boats swimming down the Missouri, bound for St. Louis, laden with
bales of buffalo and beaver peltry, every pound of which would be
worth ten dollars at the capital of the fur trade; and we should
restore to our minds the old pictures of savage tribesmen, decked
in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumed bonnets, armed with lance
and sinewed bow and bull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they
got their horses and how they got their food.

The great early mid-continental highway, known as the Oregon
Trail or the Overland Trail, was by way of the Missouri up the
Platte Valley, thence across the mountains. We know more of this
route because it was not discontinued, but came steadily more and
more into use, for one reason after another. The fur traders used
it, the Forty-Niners used it, the cattlemen used it in part, the
railroads used it; and, lastly, the settlers and farmers used it
most of all.

In physical features the Platte River route was similar to that
of the Arkansas Valley. Each at its eastern extremity, for a few
days' travel, passed over the rolling grass-covered and
flower-besprinkled prairies ere it broke into the high and dry
lands of the Plains, with their green or grey or brown covering
of practically flowerless short grasses. But between the two
trails of the Arkansas and the Platte there existed certain wide
differences. At the middle of the nineteenth century the two
trails were quite distinct in personnel, if that word may be
used. The Santa Fe Trail showed Spanish influences; that of the
Platte Valley remained far more nearly American.

Thus far the frontier had always been altering the man who came