We learn that in 1831 a party of two hundred persons, with one hundred wagons and two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods, started for Santa Fé. This party was notable in that one of its members was Josiah Gregg, a level-headed, shrewd man, who was later to become famous as the historian of the Santa Fé trail. Nearly all the later histories of that highway and its peculiarities are based upon Gregg’s able work; which fact he himself points out with a certain plaintiveness in his later years (1846), stating that pillagers of his papers did not always stop to give him credit. Gregg was a big man, a thinker, a man whose sound sense would succeed in any time. One likens him to the good, sensible business man of to-day, the mainstay of our republic, the practical conductor of affairs. One detail will serve to show how much in advance he was of his time. In 1846 we find the Easterner, Francis Parkman, and his friend Shaw, killing scores of the great bisons of the plains for no better purpose than the securing of the tail for a trophy. It makes one blush to read of such wasteful barbarity as this, which could kill tons and tons of such creatures and leave the meat to rot on the ground. Our sensitive Eastern writer Parkman, keen mind and able pen as were his, was a very savage in his lust for “sport;” indeed worse than any savage, for the latter never killed for sport alone. Gregg was neither a Parkman nor a modern “lover of nature,” but something much better, a man of forethought and of good sense. His protest at the waste of life and food in the wanton killing of buffalo is one of the most worthy things of his worthy book. He prophesied what Parkman could not see with all his florid pictures of the West that was to be—a West soon to be barren of the great game that did so much to win that West from savagery. The wicked wastefulness of the killing of the buffalo was one of the American national crimes. Stout Josiah Gregg saw it and deplored it, knowing as he did that much of the success of the Southwest trade ever depended upon the buffalo.