Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/127

1859] State, on the Missouri River. The only channels of communication for the entire region west of the Missouri River to and beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific States were the Missouri River for steamboats, and the military roads established by the United States Government — that along the Arkansas River to New Mexico, known as the Santa Fé road, and those from Leavenworth and Omaha to Fort Kearny, and thence as a common route along the Platte and North Platte Rivers across the Rocky Mountains to Utah and beyond. Ox- and mule-teams, propelling heavy wagons holding from two to five tons, known as “prairie schooners,” were the ordinary means of transportation along these highways.

After reading up in the public Mercantile Library as well as possible regarding the region to be visited, in Government reports upon the explorations of Long, Pike, Frémont, and others, I started from Cincinnati at the end of February. I went to St. Louis and Jefferson City by rail, and at the latter point took a boat up the Missouri to Leavenworth, my immediate destination, as the best starting-point, according to common report, for “Pike's Peak.” As we made many landings, we were nearly thirty hours in making the trip. The boat was crowded with “Pike's-Peakers” (mostly young Western men) and their outfits. The river scenery was rather picturesque, though without any striking features, and much like that along the upper Mississippi. We stopped an hour at Kansas City, which was then nothing but a scattering village of a few dozen buildings, including some brick warehouses along the bank. It was the river landing for Westport, five miles inland, right on the boundary of Missouri and Kansas, a town of several thousand people, and famous throughout the West as the principal outfitting and receiving point for the Santa Fé or New Mexico trade. Every spring, large caravans of “prairie schooners,” consisting of from forty to eighty wagons, each hauled by ten to twelve oxen or as many mules, set out from that point laden with American goods,