Page:Curtis Club in Yellowstone Park.djvu/9

 one of them spent much thought in selecting his fishing tackle and Dr. Curtis insisted that there should be a liberal supply of stout shoes, sweaters and woolen clothes. In the high mountains of the Yellowstone the climate is always bracing, the nights cold and once in a while there will be frost even in summer. There is nothing hot or muggy about the weather there, and fortunately there are no mosquitoes.

That everything might be in readiness, all the baggage to be used in the Park was sent a week in advance in care of the Union Pacific Railroad agent at Yellowstone Station, Idaho, the entrance to the Park.

School closed on June 10th, and on the 25th, Dr. Curtis and ten of the boys boarded a Union Pacific Express train at Omaha, bound for Yellowstone. As the train pulled away from the Missouri River they felt that they were really entering the Great West, although, as a matter of fact, they were a little east of the geographic center of the United States. They were soon on the Great Plains and were much interested in a forty-mile stretch of perfectly straight track over which their train passed.

The endless plains were flat as a floor and brought to mind many a story of buffaloes, Indians and cowboys. In the same car was a Mr. Jeffries, an old ranchman from Wyoming, who had as a young man gone back and forth across these plains between Omaha and Kansas City and Denver driving wagons and stages, shooting buffaloes and fighting Indians. He spent two hours telling the boys about the early days. While he was telling his experiences the train passed through the town of Grand Island, which was only settled in 1857 and it was then the farthest frontier. Just across the river was old Fort Kearney, where buffaloes were so thick in 1860 that the commander of the fort had to issue an order to make the soldiers stop shooting them on the parade ground.

The most exciting of all Mr. Jeffries' stories was the close call he had when he was helping build the railroad. The construction camps were sometimes fifty or sixty miles beyond the last station that trains could reach. There were no settlements