These were strong four-wheeled wagons, drawn by horses, and covered with canvas tops drawn over a series of half-hoops. In these wagons were beds, clothing, stoves, cooking and eating and drinking utensils, and women, children, and whatever invalid men there were in the train. I could not tell you fairly, in such a short article as this, a tenth part of the general experiences of the people who built up the West by travelling in these trains before the railroads came. Peril surrounded them--peril in many shapes. They were attacked by Indians. They dodged the savages, they fought them, they whipped them or were massacred. They crossed rivers and swollen streams without bridges. They crossed the plains through fearful heat or still more fearful cold. They found no water, or water unfit to drink. They fell sick, they died; cholera overtook some of them, chasing after them all the way from Asia. Their horses were stolen or died or broke down. Their food ran out. There was enough adventure in the journey to fill a lifetime--even to fill an extraordinary lifetime. [Illustration: DENVER IN ITS EARLY YOUTH.] Those who reached Denver were a ragged, dust-grimed, tired-out lot, with worn horses, battered wagons, and no immediate desire except to fling themselves on the ground beside the Platte River, in the shade of the cottonwoods, and rest. Stop a moment to think of the courage and condition of those others who went all the way to Oregon! Their courage passes belief. Well, Green Russell and his Georgia men built a hut of logs, and roofed it with mud. When the rain fell it dropped on the roof as water, but it came through the roof as mud. The hut stood by that of the trader, where West Denver stands now. A third hut was built by one Ross Hutchins, and the row or street or village was called Indian Row. Gold was found in the nearby creek, and Russell took some back to Georgia to coax more of his people out to the new camp. Then there came a party of twenty persons from Lawrence, Kansas. All of Colorado was then Kansas. These new-comers went three miles farther up the river, and washed the sand for gold at a village of their own, which they called Montana. That was in midsummer. In September of the same year, 1858, some of the Georgia men--or perhaps some outsiders--organized a town where East Denver is now, and called it St. Charles. They drew up formal organization papers, and then, not knowing what to do with them, _filed them with themselves_. A month later the Georgians established at Indian Row, now West Denver, formally turned that queer little pin-point on the map into a town, which they called Auraria. A store was added to the village very quickly, and one of the merchants who opened it is alive in Denver to-day. Remember that all this was only a little more than thirty years ago, when some of my readers would have called Mr. Gladstone an old man. Prince Bismarck was fifty years old when this happened.