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Two famishing white men were eagerly searching among the debris of a deserted Indian camping ground for some morsel of food that may have been left behind, and were vainly endeavoring to swallow some dry fish bones which they had pounded between stones. The men were utterly destitute, as treacherous Indians had robbed them of everything, including all their clothing, and they were now starving in a trackless wilderness after having journeyed an entire year since they had left the last frontier habitation of a white man.

One of these two men was Ramsay Crooks, a partner of John Jacob Astor in the Pacific Fur Company. He had left St. Louis with the overland expedition to Astoria, but had become so enfeebled from hunger and privations that he had been unable to keep up with the main party, so, with five others equally debilitated, he had been painfully struggling through the snow along their route, under such vicissitudes of sufferings that four of his companions had been unable to continue the journey, and now, with one comrade, he was on the verge of perishing from destitution.

It is an illustration of the wonderful development of civilization in the West that in later years through transcontinental trains, with Pullmans and dining cars, ran along the very route on which this man so nearly lost his life, while his son, Col. William Crooks, was the assistant to the president of that railroad.