It grew shorter and shorter, this wagon trail to the West, as the traders came to know the country. The government surveyed a fine way for the caravans, which took them around the dangerous Cimarron desert, and clung to the waters a trifle longer; yet the travelers would have none of it, but built their trail so direct from Independence to Santa Fé that not even those air-line lovers, the railway engineers, could so very much improve it when they came to make their iron trail between those two points. One finds something uncanny when he reflects upon the discoveries of these Western regions. The ancient ways seem to have lain ready and waiting, the lines of travel simply falling into the foreordained plan, so that there remains no extraordinary credit to any venturer, no matter how early. For instance, we know that our hardy young soldiers, Lewis and Clark, to whom we habitually ascribe the credit of being the first white men up the great waterway of the Missouri, were preceded by half a century by the Frenchman, Sieur de la Verendrye, who took his two sons and started west by way of the Great Lakes in 1742, jumped from the Red River of the North to the Mandan villages on the Missouri, and explored the region along the Missouri, the Yellowstone and the Bighorn rivers, just one hundred years before Frémont “discovered” the Rockies! De la Verendrye is thought to have been the first man of the North to see the Rockies; yet back of him we have Nicollet and Champlain, and all those hardy ancients who sought cheerfully and hopefully for the China Sea by way of the Green Bay portage, and the Wisconsin and Minnesota rivers, in search of the fabled “Asian Strait,” which later was practically materialized in the interlocking Western rivers of America. As to Pike’s journey across the plains, we must know that the Spaniards had sent out an expedition, under Malgares, to meet him or anticipate him. The Spanish leader who thus ventured boldly so far to the east to head off this dreaded invasion of the Northern whites, and to set the Indians against them, must have traveled somewhat along this same pre-ordained trail of the Arkansas. Not all Spain could keep the feet of the young Anglo-Saxons out of that trail. There were always the adventurers; and there were always the trails there, ready, waiting, expectant, prepared for them. There is no reading so thrilling as the bare truth about our West; and the most thrilling part of it is the awesome feeling that our venturers were after all themselves but puppets in a grim and awful game. There lay the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas; and stretching out to meet them reached the Columbia and the Colorado. It was appointed, it was foregone!