“One of the contractors for government freighting had a huge prairie schooner, drawn by twenty-nine yoke of oxen, the head of each animal ornamented with a small flag, while he himself was mounted upon a mule. The contractor was quite an attraction, dressed in the peculiar western prairie and plains frontier cow-boy costume with buckskin pants, red flannel shirt, boots nearly knee high, with revolver and bowie knife buckled around his waist, dangling by his side. The procession in line, marched west along Commercial street to near Tenth. It was a long one and it was estimated that there were 7,000 people in it and at least 10,000 in the city witnessing the festivities. The ceremony of breaking ground for these two roads took place about noon, but there was nothing particularly imposing about it. The most important part of the ceremonies was the turning over of a few spadefuls of dirt by Col. Peter T. Abell, president of the road, and Capt. Eph. Butcher, the contractor, who built the Atchison & St. Joseph road. The event was witnessed by fully 5,000 people, after which the monster procession formed, and, headed by a brass band, and other bands at different places in the line, marched across White Clay creek to the grove in the southwest part of the city, where the oration was delivered by Benj. F. Stringfellow. Following the oration several speeches were made by the most prominent of the invited guests, one of them by Col. C. K. Holliday, of Topeka, one of the founders of the great Santa Fe system. The barbeque was an important feature of the affair. Six beeves, twenty hogs, and over fifty sheep, pigs and lambs were roasted. There was also prepared more than one hundred boiled hams, several thousand loaves of bread, cakes by the hundred, besides sundry other delicacies to tickle the palate and help make the occasion one long to be remembered by all present. The exercises were quite elaborate and wound up with a ball in the evening at A. S. Parker’s hall on the west side of Sixth street, between Commercial and Main and a wine supper in Charley Holbert’s building on Second street, just north of the Massasoit House. Many visitors came from a long distance east, some as far as New England. Most of the Northern States were represented, and a few came from the South. Free transportation was furnished the invited guests. Hundreds came by rail and steamboat and many poured in from the surrounding country for miles, in wagons and on horseback, from eastern Kansas and western Missouri.”