at ten days before crossed the Mississippi at Quincy. He was a
wiser and a sadder man.

On the Kansas side the first company I met was a two-horse wagon load of
men that had been exploring the Territory and were returning. They
seemed thoroughly disgusted, and said: "The wind blows so hard in
Kansas, it would blow a chicken up against the side of a barn and hold
it there for twenty-four hours."

"Kansas will not be settled in thirty years." So said my not very
amiable friend in St. Joseph. It is now somewhat more than thirty years,
and Kansas has more than a million of inhabitants. But the State has a
higher boast to make than that it has so increased in wealth and
population. It has been the first State in the Union--indeed, it has
been the first government in the world--to incorporate prohibition into
its fundamental law; and this is the best possible criticism by which to
mark its comparative progress in a Christian civilization.

CHAPTER IV.

After crossing the Missouri River I visited some of the principal
settlements in the Territory, such as Atchison, Leaven worth, Lawrence
and Topeka. Lawrence, Topeka and Manhattan were settlements made by men
from free States, and with an eye single to making Kansas a free State.
There was no town located on the Missouri River, and no settlement made
in the counties bordering on the Missouri River, that were properly free
State settlements. I thought this was a mistake. These counties had by
far the largest population, and as these counties would go, the
Territory would go; and I thought that no considerations of personal
danger ought to hinder, that these counties should have respectable
settlements of avowed Free State men among them.

What is now the city of Atchison was then a small village that was being
built among--the cottonwood trees on the banks of the Missouri River,
about twenty miles below St. Joseph, and the same distance above Fort
Leavenworth. It had been named after the notable David R. Atchison, who
had been a Senator from Missouri, and acting Vice-President of the
United States. D. R. Atchison and Gen. B. F. Stringfellow had at this
time won a national notoriety in this struggle now going on in Kansas;
and both were leading members in the Atchison town company. Dr.
Stringfellow was deputed to act as editor-in-chief of the _Squatter
Sovereign_, a paper at that time started in Atchison; but the editor was
Robert S. Kelly. Bob Kelly, as he was popularly