Finally making her adieu to her parents, to brother, sisters and relatives, she started westward about the 20th of March. A few days were spent with Mr. C. A. Bloomer, a brother of her husband, at Little Rock near Buffalo, and several more in the family of Mr. F. V. Chamberlain, in Chicago. That city was just then beginning to put on metropolitan airs and had a population of 40,000 or 50,000. Here Mrs. Bloomer bade good-bye to a niece who had accompanied her thus far, and who took the cars to meet a brother in the central part of the state. Leaving Chicago, the travelers proceeded by railroad to Alton. The country on either side of the road exhibited the vast prairies of the state in an almost unbroken condition for a great part of the way, and it is recollected that from the car windows deer and other game were frequently seen running at large. Springfield, the state capital, was then only a small village. The railroad terminated at Alton, and from thence the passage was by steamboat to St. Louis. At that city, then just beginning to loom up in importance among the great western towns, the halt was first at a hotel; but a call having been made at the hospitable home of Mrs. Frances D. Gage, her house thereafter became the home of the travelers until they embarked on a steamer on the Missouri River for their destination. We now give Mrs. Bloomer’s reminiscences, written some years later by herself: “EARLY DAYS IN THE WEST. “In compliance with the wishes of my old-settler friends, I have called to remembrance and jotted down some of the events connected with the early years of my residence in this western land. I fear they will not prove as interesting to my readers as they were to me at the time of their occurrence and are now as I recall them after a lapse of thirty-eight years. “One beautiful spring day in the middle of April, 1855, I first set foot on Iowa soil in our neighboring city of Glenwood. We came from our New York home to settle in Council Bluffs. The only public conveyance at that time to this section of the country was the stagecoach across the state from Davenport and the Missouri-river steamer hailing from St. Louis. Preferring the steamer we went to St. Louis to embark for our destination, but learned on reaching there that owing to low water no boat had yet been able to come as far as this city, St. Joseph having been the farthest point reached. “DELAYED IN ST. LOUIS. “Encouraged with the hope that by tarrying in St. Louis a week we could come all the way through by steamer we restrained our impatience and spent a week very pleasantly with our old-time friend, Frances D. Gage. She was a noted writer and lecturer of that day, but has since laid down the burden of life and gone to her reward.