In presenting this edition there are no excuses to offer. The author has been true to nature and to history, and the publishers have done their part in a manner that must excite wonder and commendation when one thinks of what has been achieved in the wilderness, the advance that has been made in the art of the printer within the few years that have elapsed since the sketches appearing in the book were made. It hardly needs intuition to foretell success for this little volume. BYRON GROO. May, 1897. "Far in the West there lies a desert land, where the mountains Lift, through perpetual snows, their lofty and luminous summits. Where the gorge, like a gate way, Opens a passage wide to the wheels of the emigrant's wagon." PLATES. The Start from Missouri River. Nebraska Landscape with Prairie Fire. Morning at Chimney Rock. Camp at Scott's Bluffs. Laramie Peak from the Black Hills. Ford of the Green River. First Glimpse of the Valley. [Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN D. HOLLADAY.] THE PIONEER TRAIL. This day, within the hour, I took from its place of concealment "An Old Sketch-Book." It lies before me now, I turn its leaves and live once more a past experience. Well, well! How vividly this book brings to me again those stirring days! Why, these are days gone by this quarter, yes, nearer this half century! How unexpectedly we sometimes come upon the past--turn it up, as it were, from the mold of time as with the plow one might bring to light from out the earth some lost and forgotten thing. This book, with its buckskin covers, revivifies dead hours, makes me live again those times when life for me was new; or, if not exactly that, brings them back in memory as reminders of times and conditions now passed away forever. The book is a reminder, old, battered, dusty, yet truthful, of what an ox-team journey across the western plains and over the Rockies was in the years that are gone. The book so long neglected, now so full of interest, received hard usage in those former days. Before it lay at rest so long, gathering dust and cobwebs about it, like a true pioneer it was made to rough it in this world. It learned to withstand the brunt of many a hard encounter. Master and book were companions on a long and toilsome journey.