One of the early features of the travel and traffic between Kansas City and the West was the old Concord Coach and another was the ox and mule wagon known as the "Prairie Schooner." The coaches carried from ten to fifteen passengers, and the passengers as a rule carried from two to a dozen weapons of defence against the Indians. At one time the fare per passenger from Westport to Santa Fé, New Mexico, was $175 in gold, and the schedule time was thirteen days and six hours. The trip involved travelling night and day, asleep and awake, without stopping except for meals. The "Overland Mail Express Company" maintained an office for years on the Levee, and for carrying mails received $172,000 a year. Mail, passengers, and express matter usually yielded from $5000 to $6000 a trip. In 1843, the Mexican trade from this point was suspended by Santa Anna, who closed the northern port of entry. As soon, however, as the embargo was removed, trade revived and greatly increased. At this time Atchison, Leavenworth, St. Joseph, and Omaha entered upon the same business, but until the Civil War commenced Kansas City retained most of the trade. A book published in 1843 shows the tonnage between Kansas City and Mexico to have increased from 15,000 tons in 1822, to 150,000 tons in 1837, the increase being fairly uniform over the entire period. In 1850, 600 wagons began the overland trip from Kansas City; by 1855 the trade had grown to a total valuation of at least $5,000,000, and by 1860 had still further increased to a point which attracted national attention. In that year a correspondent sent by the _New York Herald_ to study the statistics of the business, reported that there were shipped from Kansas City in that year 16,439,134 pounds of freight, employing 7084 men, 6147 mules, 27,920 yoke of oxen and 3033 wagons, to which should be added the statistics of the trade with the towns of Kansas and Nebraska. This, for that time, enormous bulk of business, passed over the Santa Fé trail which is now almost exactly the route of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé Railroad. At the close of the Civil War in 1865, during which Kansas City, in common with all the border towns of Missouri and Kansas, was disturbed by the conflict, a tremendous immigration began to flow westward through the city. Railroad enterprises in Kansas and beyond were opening up the country for settlement, and the families of those who had lately been engaged in war rushed westward to take up the vacant lands offered them. The first railroads entering the city were the Hannibal & St. Joseph (which is now a part of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy system) and the Missouri Pacific--the first entering from the direction of Chicago, and the last from the direction of St. Louis. The first built to the west was the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, afterwards known as the Kansas Pacific, now a part of the Union Pacific. [Illustration THE CITY HALL, KANSAS CITY.]