Just south of the Wakarusa crossing and a few hundred yards around the brow of the hill, there lies a parcel of level ground, which was an ideal place for camping. It is now occupied by the public road, and church and school-house grounds. This was a famous camping place for the Sac and Fox and all other Indians who used the trail. If you step up to the stone fence just east of the schoolhouse, looking over you will notice a deep ditch washed out down the creek bank, on the side of which a large oak tree stands, with many of its roots exposed. This ditch marks the path first used by the Indians as they went back and forth from the camping ground to the spring of sweet, beautiful water that flows from out the rocks at the foot of the hill. Modern history of this portion of the valley begins with this camping place. It was not only a resting place, but a place where consultations and conferences were held, and where the eloquent ones told of the glory of Black Hawk, the wisdom of Keokuk, and the splendid history of their tribe. It was said that the older men were despondent, but that the younger men thought that there was a possibility of rebuilding their tribal fortunes in the new country, and that some day they would be as powerful and as prosperous as they had hoped to be in Iowa and upon other lands belonging to them. But the Sac and Fox are gone; the trail knows them no more; the sweet waters still flow from the beautiful spring, and a white man who never knew them has built a house near by on the bluff by the side of the road. The Stone Bridge The Indian trail had given away and had gradually become merged into a public road, here and there forced back to section lines, but in the main sustaining its diagonal course across the country and being known as the Topeka and Ottawa State Road. Jacob Welchans was not only an extraordinarily fine surveyor, whose corner-stones and monuments are now and always will be recognized in Shawnee County as the best evidence of the location of land boundaries, but he also engaged in country school-teaching, and a number of times taught in the little school-house established near the Wakarusa River and by the old Sac and Fox spring. The ford across the Wakarusa at this point was not an extra good one. The bottom was rock, but there was a steep hill on one side and a low, springy place on the other; and, excepting times when the stream was very low, the water was of considerable depth over the fording place, and it was not an uncommon sight to see a farmer's boy on an old gray mare fording children across in the morning and in the afternoon, so that they could go to and from school.