ric starving camp.

Up on the high mountain side, for the most part hid in the forest, lie
the snowsheds and tunnels of the railway, now encountering its stiffest
climb up the steep slopes to the summit of the Sierras. The
author visited this spot of melancholy history in company with the
vice-president of the great railway line which here swings up so
steadily and easily over the Sierras. Bit by bit we checked out as best
we might the fateful spots mentioned in the story of the Donner Party. A
splendid motor highway runs by the lakeside now. While we halted our
own car there, a motor car drove up from the westward--following
that practical automobile highway which now exists from the plains of
California across the Sierras and east over precisely that trail
where once the weary feet of the oxen dragged the wagons of the early
emigrants. It was a small car of no expensive type. It was loaded down
with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely could be seen. It
carried five human occupants--an Iowa farmer and his family. They had
been out to California for a season. Casually they had left Los Angeles,
had traveled north up the valleys of California, east across the summit
of the Sierras, and were here now bound for Iowa over the old emigrant
trail!

We hailed this new traveler on the old trail. I do not know whether or
not he had any idea of the early days of that great highway; I suspect
that he could tell only of its present motoring possibilities. But his
wheels were passing over the marks left more than half a century ago
by the cracked felloes of the emigrant wagons going west in search
of homes. If we seek history, let us ponder that chance pause of the
eastbound family, traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of
the graves of the travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone. What
an epoch was spanned in the passing of that frontier!

Chapter VII. The Indian Wars

It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages that,
although we undertook to speak of the last American frontier, all that
we really thus far have done has been to describe a series of frontiers
from the Missouri westward. In part this is true. But it was precisely
in this large, loose, and irregular fashion that we actually arrived at
our last frontier. Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced
by any steady or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating
map--and one which I wish we might s