Immediately after the contract was signed I went to Fort Leavenworth, and with Lieutenant Dubarry of the Quartermaster's Department set out to locate another point. We traveled up the Missouri River as far as Plattsmouth, when we concluded Nebraska City, Neb., was the most available point upon the river for our business. I at once arranged with the citizens of that town to build warehouses, preparatory to receiving the large quantities of supplies the Government would soon begin to ship to that point. The supplies sent to Utah in the year 1858 were enormous, being over sixteen million pounds, requiring over three thousand five hundred large wagons and teams to transport them. We found it was as much as we could do to meet the Government requirements with the two points in full operation. As agreed, I took charge of the new station and moved my family from my farm, nine miles south of Kansas City, Mo., to Nebraska City, where I bought a home for them and commenced to carry out my part of the agreement. The firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell conducted the business for two years, and in the spring of 1860 I bought out my partners and continued the business in my own name that year. In Nebraska City I found a very intelligent, enterprising, and clever people, among whom were S. F. Knuckle, J. Sterling Morton, Robert Hawk Dillon, Colonel Tewksberry, McCann, Metcalf, Rhodes, O. P. Mason, Judge Kinney, Rinkers, Seigle, and a great many others of integrity and enterprise. I never did business more pleasantly than with the gentlemen whom I met during my residence of nine years there. CHAPTER VII. FAITHFUL FRIENDS. To one who has had to make friends of the brute creation, it is natural for him to claim companionship with those domestic animals with which he is constantly drawn by day and night, such as horses, oxen, mules, and dogs. The dog is most thoroughly the comrade of those who dwell upon the frontier, and a chapter regarding them will not, I feel, be uninteresting to the reader. I have always been a great admirer of a good dog, but my knowledge of them is a general one, such as you and a great many other Western men have. I have never made him a scientific study, but I think he is the only domestic animal, and I don't know but the only animal that takes a joint ownership in all of his master's property so far as he can comprehend it, whether it be personal, portable, or realistic; in other words, the man owns the dog and his other property, and the dog seems to claim or own the man and all of his other effects, so far as he can comprehend them. I had a Shepherd dog that would not allow a stranger to take hold of me or my horse, saddle, bridle, rope, spurs, gun, or anything else that he thought belonged to _us_, without making a fuss about it, and he seemed to think stepping upon a rope or blanket, or anything of that kind, was just the same as taking hold with the hands, and yet he was very good-natured with strangers otherwise.