“Twelve o’clock. Our principal streets are well lined and coated with men, avowedly on the raid for flour. “Later. Flour is seized wherever found, in large or small quantities, and taken to a common depot. On the pretext under which several lots of flour were confiscated, we do not think that any one would consider it wrong or objectionable to store flour, under the present circumstances, in fire-proof cellars or warehouses. “We, however, do not indorse the concealing of flour under floors or haystacks when the article is up to the present price. We know of no parties that were holders of flour that could not have realized a handsome profit at seventy-five dollars per sack; but in favor of merchants that have invested in this staple at high figures, we should state that we have known flour to be sold within a circumference of a few hundred miles at the rate of five dollars per pound, and no raiders in the market.” “VIRGINIA CITY, M. T., May 6, 1865. “The business of the week is a slight improvement over many weeks past, owing to the fine weather sending miners all to work. “Flour. Still continues very scarce, three small lots, only one hundred and twenty-one sacks in all, having arrived from over the range, and were rapidly sold at seventy-five dollars per sack. The want of this staple is very much felt, as all substitutes for this article are about exhausted.” These curious and rapidly forgotten records of another day show us clearly that, even as late as the Civil War, there was a vast land beyond the Missouri whose people and whose customs were different from those of the East; which had earned its own right to be different; which was as strong and self-reliant and resourceful as though it were part of another sphere; and which might claim that it had solved its own problems for itself and asked no aid. Yet it was this very aloofness and independence that had always threatened, in one way or another, the secession of the West in fact or in sympathy from the East. Therefore we count that a great day—a day fatal for the West, but glorious for America—when the heads of the streams were reached and the mountains overrun. It was a great day, an important date—though unrecorded in any history of this land—when the West had gone as far away as it could, and at last had turned and begun to come back home! At the end of the Civil War the West had exhausted all the possibilities of down-stream and up-stream transportation. It had developed its resources to a remarkable degree. But now the time was come for newer, more rapid, and more revolutionary methods. The West was at the beginning of another and not less interesting era, a time of swift and startling change.