Western water transportation found its natural terminus where the Kaw or Kansas River empties into the Missouri. From this circumstance that locality had for years been the starting-point for the overland caravans or wagon-trains. Fort Leavenworth was the point of rendezvous for those going to California and Oregon; Independence the place of outfit for those destined to Santa Fe. Grouped about these two points were half a dozen heavy slaveholding counties of Missouri,--Platte, Clay, Bay, Jackson, Lafayette, Saline, and others. Platte County, the home of Senator Atchison, was their Western outpost, and lay like an outspread fan in the great bend of the Missouri, commanding from thirty to fifty miles of river front. Nearly all of Kansas attainable by the usual water transportation and travel lay immediately opposite. A glance at the map will show how easily local sentiment could influence or dominate commerce and travel on the Missouri River. In this connection the character of the population must be taken into account. The spirit of intolerance which once pervaded all slaveholding communities, in whatever State of the Union, was here rampant to an unusual degree. The rural inhabitants were marked by the strong characteristics of the frontier,--fondness of adventure, recklessness of exposure or danger to life, a boastful assertion of personal right, privilege, or prowess, a daily and hourly familiarity with the use of fire-arms. These again were heightened by two special influences--the presence of Indian tribes whose reservations lay just across the border, and the advent and preparation of each summer's emigration across the great plains. The "Argonauts of '49" were not all gamblers and cut-throats of border song and story. Generally, however, they were men of decision and will, all mere drift-wood in the great current of gold-seekers being soon washed ashore and left behind. Until they finished their last dinner at the Planter's House in St. Louis, the fledgelings of cities, the lawyers, doctors, merchants, and speculators, were in or of civilization. Perhaps they even resisted the contamination of cards and drink, profanity and revolver salutations, while the gilded and tinseled Missouri River steamboat bore them for three days against its muddy current and boiling eddies to meet their company and their outfit. [Illustration: DAVID R. ATCHISON.]