EARLY DAY STORIES. 29 



CHAPTER IV. 



Halted by a Band of Pawnees at Shell Creek Pay Toll for 

 crossing the creek Cross Loup Fork near the present 

 site of Genoa. 



The object of writing this personal narrative with some 

 minuteness of detail, is to place before the readers as clear 

 a view as may be, of conditions in the country of the plains 

 as they appeared to the writer in the year 1852, or two 

 years before there were any white people living in Nebraska, 

 excepting those doing either military or missionary duty 

 or engaged in trade with the Indians or employed by the 

 traders as hunters and trappers. In the year 1852 Ne- 

 braska was Indian country, with no white people except- 

 ing those just mentioned. The changes that have taken 

 place since that time are astounding. It is doubtful if any 

 of the thousands who passed along up the valley of the 

 Platte, by way of the Overland Trail, in the year 1852 had 

 the very faintest thought or conception of what was to fol- 

 low in so short a time the transforming of a wilderness 

 filled with herds of buffalo and bands of roving tribes of 

 Indians as wild as the game they pursued and upon which 

 they subsisted; into a magnificent farming country the 

 best may be in the world ; criss-crossed with railroads, dot- 

 ted with thirving and growing cities and villages, covered 

 with contented and prosperous communities of people, who 

 are growing rich upon the products of a soil that had time 

 and again been pronounced and denounced as desert. I am 

 not expressing merely my own thoughts which I held at 

 that time as to this country and its future, but the thoughts 

 and opinions of others as far as I heard them expressed. 

 If there was a man in our company of forty-two men, or 

 if among the thousands who in 1852 passed over the 2,800 



