"Well, the dinner was completely spoiled by the six uninvited guests, but while I cried with mortification, the officers laughed and enjoyed the joke."
Ft. McPherson was located eighteen miles east of North Platte, but was abandoned four years ago.
Notwithstanding their kindness and entertaining home I was anxious to be on the home way, and biding Mrs. C. and Arta good-bye at the depot, I left Monday evening for Plum Creek.
How little I thought when I kissed the dear child Orra good-bye, and whom I had already learned to love, that I would have the sad duty of adding a tribute to her memory. Together we took my last walk about their home, gathering pebbles from their gravel walks, flowers from the lawn and leaves from the trees, for me to carry away.
I left her a very happy child over the anticipation of a trip to the east where the family would join Mr. Cody for some time. I cannot do better than to quote from a letter received from the sorrow-stricken mother.
"Orra, my precious darling, that promised so fair, was called from us on the 24th of October, '83, and we carried her remains to Rochester, N. Y., and laid them by the side of her little brother, in a grave lined with evergreens and flowers. When we visited the sacred spot last summer, she said: 'Mamma, won't you lay me by brother's side when I die?' Oh, how soon we have had to grant her request! If it was not for the hope of heaven and again meeting there, my affliction would be more than I could bear, but I have consigned her to Him who gave my lovely child to me for these short years, and can say, 'Thy will be done.'"
Night traveling again debarred our seeing much that would have been interesting, but it was my most convenient train, and an elderly lady from Ft. Collins, Colorado, made the way pleasant by telling of how they had gone to Colorado from Iowa, four years ago, and now could not be induced to return. Lived at the foot of mountains that had never been without a snow-cap since she first saw them.
Arrived at Plum Creek about ten o'clock, and as I had no friends to meet me here, asked to be directed to a hotel, and remarked that we preferred a temperance hotel. "That's all the kind we keep here," the gentleman replied with an injured air, and I was shown to the Johnston House.
I had written to old friends and neighbors who had left Pennsylvania about a year ago, and located twenty-five miles south-west of Plum creek, to meet me here; but letters do not find their way out to the little sod post-offices very promptly, and as I waited their coming Tuesday, I spent the day in gathering of the early history of Plum Creek.
Through the kindness of Mrs. E. D. Johnston, we were introduced to Judge R. B. Pierce, who came from Maryland to Plum Creek, in April, 1873, and was soon after elected county judge, which office he still holds. He told how they had found no signs of a town but a station house, and lived in box-cars with a family of five children until he built a house, which was the first dwelling-house on the present town-site. One Daniel Freeman had located and platted a town-site one mile east, but the railroad company located the station just a mile further west.