Wood, hay, boxes, trunks, indeed almost anything that could be imagined, were common articles of transport in the mountains, and it was at times a bit odd to see a little burro almost hidden under a couple of Saratoga trunks so big that he could neither lie down nor roll over under them. The pack-train might comprise a score or a hundred horses, and the conduct of such a train was no small matter of skill and generalship. Oxen were often used as pack-animals, the burden frequently being lashed to the horns. An ox could carry a fifty-pound sack of flour on top of its head, though special saddles were sometimes used for ox-packing. On the overland trail to California, cows were sometimes employed as pack-animals, and were often used in harness as draft-animals. Every one knows the story of the carts and hand-barrows of the great Mormon emigration. Under the old Western conditions of transportation, is it any wonder that horse-stealing was regarded as the worst crime of the calendar? The transportation of paddle and portage, of sawbuck saddle and panniers, however, could not forever serve except in the roughest of the mountain chains. The demand for wheeled vehicles was urgent, and the supply for that demand was forthcoming in so far as human ingenuity and resourcefulness could meet it. There arose masters in transportation, common carriers of world-wide fame. The pony express was a wonderful thing in its way, and some of the old-time stage-lines that first began to run out into the West were hardly less wonderful. For instance, there was an overland stage-line that ran from Atchison, on the Missouri River, across the plains, and up into Montana by way of Denver and Salt Lake City. It made the trip from Atchison to Helena, nearly two thousand miles, in twenty-two days.[24] Down the old waterways from the placers of Alder Gulch to the same town of Atchison was a distance of about three thousand miles. The stage-line began to shorten distances and lay out straight lines, so that now the West was visited by vast numbers of sight-seers, tourists, investigators, and the like, in addition to the actual population of the land, the men that called the West their home.