322 MEN I HAVE FISHED WITH. 



and only wanted change and adventure. I had read all 

 about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and 

 Cooper's men of fiction, and dollars cut no figure in my 

 calculations. I was young; old age and its needs seemed 

 to be centuries away, if indeed it was ever thought of. I 

 revelled in my youth and strength, and thought they 

 would last forever. The quarter of a century that I had 

 lived seemed to comprise the whole existence of the 

 world, and all that had gone before my recollection was 

 merely a fairy tale. 



When I left Albany, in 1854, my father had exacted 

 a promise that I would not join an expedition against the 

 Indians. He knew that I loved a fight of most any kind, 

 and when he learned that I proposed to go to the Ozarks 

 he wrote me that he wanted me to go to Kansas and 

 select a farm on which he could pass his declining years. 

 This was not funny then, but it is to-day. My father was 

 reared on a farm, but left it when eighteen years old, and 

 always looked to getting back on one. Now, when I am 

 six years older than he was then, I know that his nervous 

 organization, after years of absence from farm life, was 

 no more fitted to it than my very different temperament 

 was. But he wrote me that he had a land warrant from 

 the War of 1812 (not his own by right of service, for he 

 was born in 1800), and that he wanted me to select the 

 place in Kansas. 



The newspapers had been filled with accounts of 

 "bleeding Kansas," and the troubles were not entirely 

 over when our surveying party came out of the Minne- 

 sota woods in the last month of 1856. There was a fight 

 there over the slavery question a matter that I had paid 

 no attention to, but there was a fight. I looked around 

 and got letters of introduction to General Jim Lane, the 

 "Free State" leader, and went to Kansas; we spelled it 



