A supper and a ball were given by the losing company. And what a ball-room--the Wyoming Hotel. It was a long, low house of logs and the dance-room was lighted by a row of tallow candles, and the music was furnished by the teamsters from the west, and yet what a time of enjoyment it was! What a contrast between the refined young girls from across the seas, and those roughly clad men from the west. Yet in the future their lives were to be linked in one and their children in turn be builders of the western empire. Well do I remember, the afternoon, when our captain, that was to be, came to our portion of the Wyoming camp and listed those who were to journey as Independents, of which my father was one. That was the first time that I had beheld a typical captain of the western plains. And still I remember his massive form, his keen eye, his commanding voice and gestures. But his true southern accent plainly told that he had not long lived in the west, but was from the land of the sunny south. There should be a sketch of "The Slough," I remember such was made. Indeed, it should be the first in the book. But careless hands have torn it away. The first is one looking eastward over the river toward the Council Bluffs. For eastward lay the Missouri River. We saw the steamer Welcome, which had brought us up stream, the Red Wing, and other olden time boats passing occasionally up or down the stream. But westward the level horizon attracted our eyes and made us long for the time when we should start to follow the setting sun. Persistently, and with eager curiosity, the guide-book was scanned. For weeks ahead we studied the meagre information of "The Route." We learned the names, suggestively odd or quaintly poetic, and we pictured in the mind the places themselves to which they belonged. We formed conclusions to be realized later on or to be dispelled by the actualities. The imagination, heated to the utmost by traveler's tales--half true, half false--looked forward to a region of wonder and romance. Already I had met that "boss of the frontier," the western tough, who had kindly offered with the help of his bowie-knife, to slit or cut off my youthful ears. I had looked upon the frontier log-cabin, half store, half bar, decorated with the skins of the beaver and the wolf, and seen the selling by the moccasined fur-traders of buffalo robes. Before us was the land of Kit Carson, we should pass through the domains of the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Crow and the Ute. We would see the Bad Lands; the burial trees of the Arapahoe; the lands of the Medicine and the Scalp-Dance. In our path were the villages of the Prairie Dog, the home of the Coyote and the rattlesnake; of the antelope, of the buffalo, the big-horn and the grizzly bear. Prairie Creek, Loup Fork, Fort John, South Pass, Wind River Mountains--O many a name seized upon imagination and held it fast.