24 TKAINIXG THE TROTTING HOESE. 



load of merchandise to J^ew Mexico. Finally Marvin 

 agreed to take $500 for the trip, and on January 27, 

 1868, he started for MaxwelFs Mines, on the Cimarron 

 River, in Xew Mexico. He engaged in mining at 

 Elizabethtown, near Maxwell's Mines, until June, 

 when he intended startmg back to Kansas City, m 

 company with a part of the Forbing part}^ Owing to 

 a misunderstanding, however, the party left before 

 Marvin was read}^, and he changed his intentions. 

 Yisions of possible fortune in Texas was alluring, and 

 he laid his course for San Antonio. This Avas no Sun- 

 day journey in those days. The trail lay down the 

 Pecos Eiver and across the dreaded Staked Plain. A 

 writer describing this route sa3^s : 



*' It left the main trail somewhere near where the 

 western line of Kansas now is, and turned southward 

 across a plain — a vast country in fact — the very name 

 of which was a synonym of danger before civilization 

 came, and which is still almost unexplored. For this 

 nearer trail to El Paso lay across El Llano Estacado^ 

 and was in all likelihood the very dreariest road ever 

 traveled. The distances were immense, water was not 

 plenty, and Comanches were." 



Marvin returned from San Antonio to Kansas in 

 the spring of 1869 and located at Paoia, where he 

 formed a partnership with E. L. Mitchell in a livery 

 and training stable. Here he began training trotters 

 as a profession, and it has been his vocation ever since. 



His twenty years of marvelously successful experi- 

 ence, the pith of which this book is designed to record 

 and teach, thus began in earnest. 



There is little more of interest of the great trainer's 



