SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON 675 
My father had a little garden. He was planting potatoes one day with 
my aid, when several toads were unearthed. JI was very curious to know 
where they came from, and he told me that they grew in the ground. I puzzled 
my childish brain about them and determined to raise a crop of them myself, 
so the next day I sedulously collected all the small toads I could find, in my 
little apron, and proceeded to plant them as I had seen my father plant pota- 
toes. My father observed me and asked what I was doing. I told him I was 
planting them to see them grow. It caused him so much amusement that I 
went away crying to tell my mother about it. For years, until I was so old 
that I resented it, my father always called me “Toad.” 
The double point of this batrachian incident lies in its indica- 
tion of an experimental mind, and in the coincidence that forty- 
one years later Williston succeeded Cope as one of the leading 
world-students of the extinct batrachian group. 
The intellectual and social environment of Roxbury probably 
never would have produced a geologist or a paleontologist, and 
while the next step in Williston’s life was hard, yet it was propitious, 
as the events proved: 
In the spring of 1857 my parents decided to emigrate to Kansas. A 
colony had left the year before for Manhattan, and the letters that came back 
had infected many with the desire to go West. .... The abolitionists were 
urging eastern people to colonize the territory in order to help John Brown 
preserve it to the ‘Free States.’ . . . . The trip was long and tedious, by 
rail to St. Louis, then a small place, and thence by steamboat up the Missouri 
River to Leavenworth. There was no Kansas City then. We reached 
Leavenworth about the twentieth of May. Here we remained a few days in 
a very small hotel, while my father bought a yoke of oxen and a wagon and 
such provisions and household things as were indispensable, and we started 
on the slow and tedious drive of 115 miles to Manhattan through a country 
but very sparsely settled. For the most part we children rode in the covered 
wagon, while my father and cousin walked and drove the oxen. My mother 
was very homesick on the way. I can remember how long and bitterly she 
cried. One could not blame her; she now realized for the first time in this 
wilderness what she was leaving behind, perhaps forever. Nor did she see 
the East again for nearly thirty years, and my father never. We reached 
Manhattan June 7. The Emigrant Aid Society, under whose auspices this 
long journey was undertaken, provided a small log cabin, about 15 feet square 
inside, two and a half miles east of Manhattan, for our temporary use until a 
house could be built in the town itself. My memory of events is now becom- 
ing clearer. The house of our temporary occupation had but a single room 
with a loft reached by a ladder. There were two beds in the room below, 
screened off by cloth curtains that my mother soon found for them, and we 
