If we turn from the form to the substance of Fowler’s Journal, and ask to see the bill of lading, curious to know what useful or valuable information is contained in so singular a vehicle of conveyance, it may be confidently said that this “prairie schooner” is well freighted for a “voige” on the highway of Americana; for the cargo is a novel and notable contribution to our knowledge of early commercial venture and pioneering adventure in the Great West. It is simply a story of the trader and trapper, unsupported by the soldier, unimpeded by the priest, and in no danger from the politician. The scene is set in the wilderness; the time is when pack-animals are driven across the stage, before the first wheels rolled over the plains from the States to Santa Fé; and the actors have very real parts to perform. From the respective dates of Pursley, of Lalande, and of Pike, whose several travels were among the first if not the earliest overland from the United States to the Spanish settlements, on the part of American citizens—from the opening years of the century to the 1821-22 of Fowler—various parties were on the Arkansaw in what are now Kansas and Colorado. But the records of where they went or what they did? That is the question. Ezekiel Williams, James Workman, Samuel Spencer, sole and shadowy survivors of Coyner’s “Lost Trappers,” are only uneasy spirits flitting from the Missouri to Mexico and California in an apocryphal book, never materializing out of fable-land into historical environment. Wherever other American trappers or traders may have gone on the Arkansaw or even the Rio Grande in those days, and whatever they may have done, Fowler was first to forge another sound link in the chain which already reached from Pike to Long. The latter’s justly celebrated expedition came down the Arkansaw and the Canadian in 1820. Pike ascended the main river from its great bend to its sources in 1806, the same year that his lieutenant, Wilkinson, descended this stream from the point where he parted from his captain. For the lower reaches of the river we have Thomas Nuttall’s Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, during the year 1819, and various other accounts. But I know of no record, earlier in date than Fowler’s, of continuous ascent of the river from Fort Smith to the present position of Pueblo in Colorado. He meandered the whole course of the Arkansaw between the points named, except his cut-off of a small portion by the Verdigris trail. One of his men, Lewis Dawson, who was killed by a grizzly bear at the mouth of the Purgatory—and who, let us hope, left that place for happier hunting-grounds—may not have been the first white American buried in Colorado soil; but the record of a prior funeral would be far to seek. Whose was the first habitable and inhabited house on the spot where Pueblo now stands? Fowler’s, probably; for Pike’s stockade was hardly a house, and Jim Beckwourth came twenty years after Fowler. The Taos Trail