sh in the memory
of my parents. When neighbors came to visit us, long hours were spent
in talking over and comparing experiences. I thrilled as my father
told of climbing Long's Peak, the eastern sentinel of the Rockies--of
Estes Park, teeming with trout and game. I thought then that I had
been born too late--that all the big things in the world were past
history. I feared then that even the Rockies would lose their wildness
before I could explore them.

Within sight and sound of the farm where I was born, a number of Civil
War skirmishes took place. The eastern Kansas border during the trying
time of the early sixties was perhaps the worst place in all the world
to live. Raiding parties plundered on both sides of the
Kansas-Missouri line. My mother watched the battle of Mine Creek from
the dooryard; saw the soldiers streaming by, and prayed fervently as
the tide of battle swayed back and forth. My father was fighting in
that battle. These frontier conflicts were still the favorite topics
of conversation at neighborhood gatherings when I was a little boy. I
listened breathlessly to them and lived them over in my imagination.
Of all the tales recounted around our fire, I loved that of the gold
rush of '59 best--my father and mother had participated in it--and I'm
sure that story moved me most of all to obey Horace Greeley's
injunction.

The wagons, in the beginning of the journey, formed a train, keeping
close together for mutual protection. As they neared the Rockies, they
scattered, each party following its individual route. Late in the
summer, high up in the mountains near Breckenridge, Colorado, my father
fell ill of "mountain fever." My mother, who weighed less than one
hundred pounds, alone drove the pony team back across the plains to
eastern Kansas. Many weeks were spent en route. Sometimes they camped
for a night with westward-bound wagons; then resumed the eastward
journey alone. Buffalo, migrating southward, literally covered the
prairie--at times, so dense were their ranks, my mother had to stop the
team to let the herds go by.

One experience of this trying trip, often related by my father, filled
me with lasting admiration for my plucky mother.

"We were camped one night beneath some cottonwoods beside a wide,
shallow stream," father would say, "and I was unable to move from my
bed in the wagon. Your mother cared for the team, started a fire, and
got supper. Shortly after dark, and be