All are yet living and residents of the State, except Mrs. Miles, who recently passed to a higher life, respected and loved by all who knew her; and I here venture the opinion that no other party of emigrants in this country, of equal number, can show a better record.
Many novel events occurred on this trip also, but to mention all the new and novel experiences incident to an expedition of that kind would require more than the allotted space for a chapter. I will, therefore, confine the account to one incident alone which will make manifest the radical changes that are sometimes wrought in the individual lives of people, in a sometimes radically short space of time. Two of the ladies of the party before mentioned arrived in Leavenworth about one month previous to their departure on this trip. They were just graduated from a three years' course of study in a female seminary, and in thirty days from that time they were transported from their boarding-school surroundings to the wilds of the Great American Desert, and after passing into the timberless portion of the great desert, the great query with them was as to how and where they were to secure fuel necessary for culinary purposes; and when informed that it would be necessary to gather and use buffalo chips for that purpose, their incredulity became manifest, and their curiosity was rather increased than satisfied. When called upon to go, gunny-sack in hand, out from the line of travel to gather the necessary fuel, it was difficult to persuade them they were not being made the victims of a joke; but when finally led into the field of "chips," and the discovery made of their character, the expression upon the face of each would have been a delight to an artist and amusing to the beholder; and to say that the distance between the chip-field and the camp was covered by them in the time rarely, if ever, covered by the native antelope, is to speak without exaggeration.
As before stated, all of the seven members of this party, on their arrival in Denver, became residents and actively identified in the various departments of life and business, and to each and every one there is no spot on the face of this globe that is quite so good, so grand, and so dear as the Centennial State, of which Denver is the center of their love.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE OVERLAND MAIL.
Over thirty-two years ago, when a bachelor occupied the President's mansion at Washington, and there was no Pacific Railroad and no transcontinental telegraph line in operation over the Great American Desert of the old schoolbooks, and the wild Indian was lord of the manor—a true native American sovereign—St. Joseph, Mo., was the western terminus of railway transportation. Beyond that point the traveler bound for the regions of the Occident had his choice of a stage-coach, an ox-team, a pack-mule, or some equally stirring method of reaching San Francisco.
Just at that interesting period in our history—when the gold and silver excitement, and other local advantages of the Pacific Coast, had concentrated an enterprising population and business at San Francisco and the adjacent districts—the difficulty of communication with the East was greatly deplored, and the rapid overland mail service became an object of general solicitude. In the year 1859 several magnates in Wall Street formed a formidable lobby at Washington in the interests of an overland mail route to California, and asked Congress for a subsidy for carrying the mails overland for one year between New York and San Francisco.
The distance was 1,950 miles. Mr. Russell proposed to cover this distance with a mail line between St. Joseph, Mo., and San Francisco, that would deliver letters at either end of the route within ten days.