Those who have known him ever since the past Territorial days of Kansas, will concede that, for the accomplishment of a purpose unto which he had once deliberately put his hand, no man ever breathed the fresh air of these broad prairies who followed the trail with more determination and keen, intelligent acquaintance with all bearings, overcoming difficulties, meeting objections, accepting temporary defeat (philosophically), but never relinquishing his purpose until victory crowned his effort, or failure was absolutely inevitable, than he. Suited to this was a courage as heroic as Leonidas' and sublime as Paul's. The stormy days of the fifties and sixties gave evidence of the physical side of this quality, and his entire life, of the moral. He "feared no foe in shining armor," and rather courted than avoided a passage at arms dialectic. Eminently a man of peace, and loving the pursuits that make for it, he would see no principle of right unjustly assailed without girding himself for the conflict, and standing where the blows fell thickest. Coming to this unknown country at an age when the ordinary mind takes firmest grasp of all intellectual things, and being thus deprived of that mental food necessary to satisfy and make strong, there was ever after a hungering for the things he did not have, that would not be satisfied. I remember talking with him once, while sitting on his lumber wagon, resting his team in the cotton-wood bottoms east of Atchison, and he bewailed as much as a man of his fiber could, the fate that compelled him to toil day and night while his soul was starving for that intellectual food which lay all around him, but which he did not have time to gather and devour. This, however, was not abnormal; for, even to the day of his death, he was a devoted disciple, sitting at the feet of every true Gamaliel. An intense lover of truth, and a like hater of shams, he analyzed mercilessly; not for the sake of opposing, but in search of kernels and the source of things. If he found the tree was bearing, or destined to bear evil fruit, he would do his utmost that there should be left of it neither root nor branch. Accepting good in every presented form, if he suspected evil in the garb of good, there was no waiting for a more opportune time than the then present, for such stripping and exposure as his vigorous logic, sarcasm, wit, pathos, and personal presence could produce. Humble, and exceedingly retiring in ordinary, when the truth was assailed, or wolves in sheeps' clothing appeared, he became a lion, fierce and towering; and woe betake the man or system that then became the object of his righteous wrath. Such torrents of invective as fell from his tongue; such flashes as gleamed from his gray eagle-eyes; such scorn as glowed in his thin, pallid lips, made every one tremble--an avalanche that swept all before it.