To-day we think in straight lines. We believe, ignorantly, that our forefathers moved directly westward from their former homes. We do not ask how they did it, but think that in some way they must have done so. Dwellers in Chicago think of New York, and it means New York in a straight line due east. They think of California, and it implies a straight line due west. To us of to-day all railroads run without curves, and are governed only by time-schedules, which annually grow shorter. Geography is well-nigh a lost art. Indeed, there is but little use for it, since the time-tables of the great railways answer all our questions so conclusively. To-day it matters not to us what may be the course of a journey; the sole question is as to the time that journey will require. The railroad men do our thinking for us. We do not concern ourselves with how those good, but somewhat old-fashioned folk, our ancestors, got about in a country that once was large. We care not at all for matters of down-stream or up-stream. In a general way, therefore, we are prone to believe that the way from the Alleghanies to the Missouri was in a straight line. It was not so. We think that the way to the Rockies and across them was equally straight, because the railways now make it so easy. Yet as a matter of fact the railways proceeded, without much difficulty as to exploration, to lie sure, for nothing new was left for them to discover, yet in hesitating and halting steps westward, shortening the old trails, destroying the old history, wiping out the old geography of the West. All America can remember the days when we were agitated by the tremendous problem of a line of rails across the American continent, a feat so long regarded as chimerical. We knew of California and we wished for a road thither, had long wished for it. But many years before we had begun to dream of an iron road, and many years after we had dreamed of it, we made our way from the Missouri to the Rockies, over the Rockies to the Pacific, by the same methods that had brought us to the heads of all our Western rivers. We used the pack-horse and the wagon train. Those were the days of the heroically great transcontinental trails. It is interesting to study these ancient land routes; and for our purposes we shall start the wagon roads at the Missouri River, and shall speak chiefly of the two historic and great Western pathways, that by the Arkansas and that by the Platte. Of these two great land trails west of the Missouri, one, broken midway, does not deserve actually the name of transcontinental trail. This was the old Santa Fé trail, which could be called continuous only as far as the Spanish province of New Mexico. Commerce got westward even so far as California in some fashion, now and again, from Taos and the old city of Santa Fé, but Spanish trails and the old trapping roads west of New Mexico were commonly concerned with the pack-train and not the wagon.