Ten years later the "western fever" struck Ohio, and hundreds of young men of my acquaintance left there for Kansas and Nebraska. Omaha was a favorite objective point, and a town named Columbus was founded still farther west than Omaha, which was almost entirely colonized by people from Franklin County, Ohio. One of my friends, Dr. Theodore S. Case, also holding the rank of colonel, was studying medicine at the time in Columbus, Ohio, and resisted the fever until the following year, 1857, when, with a few books and a sheepskin authorizing him to write M. D. after his name, and to commit manslaughter without being called to account for it, started for the West. He knew nothing of the West, but had a general idea that he would go to St. Louis, or Keokuk, or Des Moines, or Omaha, or Council Bluffs, or possibly to "Carson City," Kan.; for a sharper, originally from Columbus, had been out West and came back with a lithographic map of a city by that name, fixed up very attractively, and with all the modern improvements of court house, city hall, depots, churches, colleges, steamboats, etc., and he bought some $15 worth of lots on one of the principal thoroughfares of the city not far from the depot. However, before he got as far west as St. Louis, he had learned the manners and tricks of such gentry, and did not go to "Carson City." By some accidental circumstance his attention was called particularly to the geographical location of Kansas City, and he at once determined to give it a look anyhow. There being no railroad nearer than Jefferson City at that time, he took the steamer Minnehaha at St. Louis, along with some other 299 fellows who were going "out west to grow up with the country," and four days afterward landed at Kansas City, May 1, 1857, almost thirty-five years ago. The first view of Kansas City was by no means prepossessing, as it consisted principally of a line of shabby looking brick and frame warehouses, dry-goods stores, groceries, saloons, restaurants, etc., strung along the levee from Wyandotte Street to a little east of Walnut Street, the whole backed up and surmounted by a rugged and precipitous bluff, from 100 to 150 feet high, covered with old dead trees, brush, dog fennel and jimson weeds, with an occasional frame or log house scattered between and among them, and a few women and children, principally darkies, looking down at the boats.