Parkman himself saw the old trail fairly well dotted with the outfits of the west-bound emigrants. He describes the difficulties then existing between the Mormons and their enemies, and the suspicions of the one party against the other. He saw one party of fifty wagons, with “hundreds of cattle,” on his way up the Platte. Far out to the West, on that Horse Creek so frequently mentioned in the history of the mountain trappers’ rendezvous, he witnessed a party of Indian women and children bathing in the stream, while meantime “a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their descendants, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth.” This was toward the headwaters of the Platte, of course, not far from that Fort Laramie where he met the grandsons of Daniel Boone, still going West, even unto the third and fourth generation. “Great changes are at hand,” says he, “great changes are at hand in all that region. With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California the buffalo will dwindle away. . . . In a few years the traveler will pass in tolerable security.” This was the utmost prophecy of one of the most intelligent and philosophical travelers that ever went from the East into the West! Yet one of the most vivid conceptions possible of the history of that day, as bearing on the strange impulse that seemed to drive these wanderers west and ever westward, may be gained from a passage of Parkman’s “Oregon Trail.” “It is worth noticing,” says he, “that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, some of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in colonial times, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Brought, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is thrown out to scorch and crack on the hot prairie.” What a world of suggestion there lies in this chance picture of the desert—what a world of American history it covers! Perhaps one day the American people will come to take interest in a past so curious and so striking as its own.