12 EARLY DAY STORIES. 



to Utah and the Pacific coast. Before the railroad was 

 built, this was the great highway connecting the East with 

 the West. Over it passed tens of thousands of emigrants 

 to Oregon, California, Utah and Colorado, and hundreds 

 of thousands of tons of freight, in the form of machinery, 

 tools, provisions, grain, feed and merchandise of all kinds 

 needed in Colorado and Utah. Nothing like it was ever 

 seen before either in ancient or modern times, and never 

 will be seen again. There were two other routes to Colo- 

 rado — one called the Arkansas valley route through southern 

 Kansas, and the other the Smoky Hill route through cen- 

 tral Kansas, but both of these together had only a small 

 fraction of the travel that passed through Nebraska over 

 the Oregon and California trails. This trail is now entirely 

 obliterated almost everywhere in the central and eastern 

 parts of the state, where the land is arable and has been 

 put in cultivation, but as one goes west where there is more 

 waste land it is yet plainly marked by several parallel tracks, 

 deeply indented in the soil but almost everywhere over- 

 grown with buffalo grass. A few years ago the writer 

 examined the trail in Scotts Bluff county just west of 

 Gehring. Here the trail passes over the low divide separ- 

 ating the northern from the southern part of the Scotts 

 Bluff Hills or mountains as they should properly be called. 

 The old trail as it passes up the slope on the eastern side, 

 and so on through the gap, is still used for a wagon road 

 today, but as it goes down the steeper western slope, it is 

 gullied out by the rains into parallel ravines from five to 

 fifteen feet deep. On the north side of the river, through 

 an almost level pasture field the four or five parallel tracks 

 were cut down into the hard, gravelly soil five or six inches, 

 but all covered over with buffalo and gramma grass. 



On both sides of the Platte river, and so on west along 

 the whole course, clear through to Oregon and California, 

 these trails were marked by the graves of those who had 



