My uncle, Nicholas Bristow, who died here November 12, 1890, age 69 years, came to Kansas before the Old Trail was in active existence—just how early, I do not know. When my father wrote his brother from their old home in Tennessee, he would send his letters in care of the Floyds at old Doniphan, a steamboat landing on the Missouri river about five miles north of Atchison. How often my uncle would get his mail depended upon how often he drove his lumbering ox-team across the forty mile stretch of intervening prairies to the river for supplies. Uncle Nick kept that yoke of oxen a long time. I remember seeing him break prairie with old Buck and Jerry, two rangy Texas steers with long spreading horns tipped with brass knobs. And when my Uncle Nick wrote his cousin, Stephen Sersene, in California to ask, in substance, if he were really finding the gold—the lure that had snatched the said relative from his old Kentucky home and sent him scampering across the plains to the Pacific slope in 1849—and could he himself, should he go out there, stand a reasonable show of filling his own poke with gold-nuggets, he posted that letter at old Doniphan and it went to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Had Uncle Nick been so fortunate as to get that letter in the mails so as to reach the Atlantic seaboard in time to connect with a semi-monthly sailing it would have reached his cousin Steven in about thirty days. With the inauguration of the Central Overland Stage Line, letters mailed at Granada or old Powhattan were taken through to the western coast in seventeen days—and later, by Pony Express, in ten days. Now, if he were living, my uncle could have his letters delivered in California by air-mail in ten hours. Thus have we progressed! Now, too, as all know, with three enabling devices, one can telegraph, talk, and sing to California, at will—and, if your photograph is of importance to the news service, it can, within certain bounds, be wired to California at the rate of an inch a minute for the breadth of the finished picture. And had my uncle decided to go to California, the Isthmus route would have been his quickest and best way, if not the only safe way. However, notwithstanding the perils and delays of overland travel, more than a hundred thousand people crossed the plains in the first two years of the gold rush—many of them passing this way. Our former townsman, Sneathen Vilott, whose home was then in Illinois, and who came to Kansas in 1855, went to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama during the gold excitement. I have often heard him talk entertainingly about that experience. Also, William J. Oliphant, father of Mrs. Robert T. Bruner, of Granada, went overland to California in 1849, and returned by way of the Isthmus. However, the goddess of gold did not smile upon either of these men. Indeed, they both worked in menial pursuits to earn return passage.