Mr. Taylor said that in 1844 and several years later the country was full of bee trees, and that cattle turned into the rush in the river bottom in winter, came out fat in the spring. In 1844 there was a settlement of fifty Kickapoo families on the flat just above the island on the Kansas side. They made a great deal of maple sugar. In summer these Indians went out to the buffalo grounds, sixty to eighty miles west of the river, returning in the fall, to be near the Missouri settlers. There never was an Indian village on the site of Atchison, although Mrs. Joe Wade, who was George Million’s daughter, claims to have remembered coming to this side of the river when she was a little girl, and seeing a dead Indian strapped to a board and leaning against a tree on the present site of Commercial street. The body was surrounded with totem poles. There was no game at that time on this side of the river. Indians themselves hunted deer on the Missouri side in winter, and were very friendly with the whites. John Taylor died on March 7, 1897. JOHN M. CROWELL. John M. Crowell was mayor of Atchison three terms, coming to the city in 1858 from Londonderry, N. H., where he was born October 22, 1823. For ten years he was a merchant here, afterwards being appointed Government storekeeper, and having charge of a distillery below town. From 1870 to 1885, he was United States postoffice inspector for nineteen States and Territories, and in that capacity visited every section of the country. He resigned to become a mail contractor, although solicited by a Democratic postmaster general to remain. His record in Washington was as good as that of any man who ever worked for the Government. Mr. Crowell was a forty-niner, crossing the plains during the great rush of that year, and engaging in sluice mining. He made four trips to California, but never by railroad. From San Francisco he visited China, South America, the Sandwich Islands, and was a great traveler in his time. He was the father of Frank G. Crowell, who was born in Atchison, and for many years a prominent citizen here, but later resigning his position as county attorney of Atchison county and moving to Kansas City to engage in the grain business, where he now lives. John M. Crowell’s daughter became Mrs. F. M. Baker, who accumulated a fortune in the grain business in Atchison. Mr. Crowell died on the eleventh day of October, 1902. [Illustration: GEORGE MILLION ] [Illustration: WILLIAM SCARBROUGH ] LUTHER DICKERSON.