And now the writer began to feel the pressure of hard necessities. For five years I had kept myself in the field on a salary utterly inadequate to my needs, and had been gradually running into debt, and these debts had to be paid. In anticipation of the future wants of my children, I had invested my available means in land; but as this land was not improved, it yielded me no return. In the distress that came on the people in those days, one means of making money presented itself, and many availed themselves of it. Gold had been discovered at Pike's Peak, and thitherward had flocked a great multitude of people. There were no railroads, and all supplies had to be carried across the plains in freighting wagons. This business was carried on by the roughest class of a rough and frontier population; still, it was an honest business, and honest men might lawfully engage in it, provided they had the hardihood to face the dangers and exposures of such a life. During the years 1862, 1863 and 1864, I went into this business with a small freighting outfit. This certainly was not just the thing for a preacher to do, but necessity knows no law. In the spring of 1862, Bro. James Butcher was going to Denver with a freighting train, and he with myself agreed to go in the same train for mutual convenience. The President, Abraham Lincoln, had ordered a draft, and many young men in Missouri had found themselves in a sore strait. In the South were their kindred, and they felt that they could not and would not fight against their own flesh and blood; and to avoid this they determined to flee to the gold mines in the mountains, where every man did what was right in his own eyes--and so they came to Atchison or Leavenworth and engaged to drive these freighting teams to Denver. Many of them were sons of rich fathers, well educated, and had never engaged in manual labor, much less in such menial work as this, and when these proud and high-spirited fellows felt what an ignoble life they had been reduced to, the reader may well believe they did not feel good-natured over it. And now, when these young gentlemen came to understand that they were to be associated with a man that was reported to be the representative of the hated Yankees, who had made war on the people of the South, and set free their slaves, they bitterly attacked me in wordy warfare. Of course I defended myself. And so day after day, in the intervals while our cattle were grazing, we debated every question relative to slavery that has been debated within the last fifty years. Their hearts were bitter; they were passionately excited, and would often end the talk, which they themselves had begun, With noisy profanity. They seemed to think they had this advantage of me, that they could swear and I could not.