The Cherry creek placers were the first after the California discoveries to attract the throngs of that gold-mad era. It was gold here in mid-continent! Gold in Kansas! It was new business for the Old Trail. The great bulk of western travel, with attending heavy commerce, was to the goldfields. Again, in 1863, when placer gold was discovered in the Alder Gulch section of Montana, traffic on the old line became enormously heavy. The three principal camps—Bannock, Virginia City, and Nevada—yielded a hundred million dollars in placer gold. Twenty thousand gold-hungry miners frantically worked the streams for the yellow metal, while thousands more men were on the road to and from that Eldorado. They were mostly from the East—men who had traveled the Old Trail through here. Indians have been mentioned. They were notably troublesome at times, especially in the buffalo country west of the Blue river. In that territory there were four hostile tribes—Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Pawnee. The Indians had the Overland Stage line between the Blue and Julesburg blocked for six weeks in 1864. Station-keepers, stage-drivers, and travelers were killed; stations were burned and stage-stock stolen. The congestion along the line extended back to Atchison. Numerous itinerant outfits were detained at Granada. Even in my time, on this side of the Blue, the sight of a red blanket out in the open was enough to send a spasm of fear surging through children, and adults did not feel any too comfortable. Always there was that feeling that approaching Indians in numbers might not be our Kickapoos, but hostiles from the other side of the Blue. Then there came a day when our citizens were sure of it—no mistaking that band of four hundred redskins for the peaceful Kickapoos! It was a queer looking cavalcade — tall braves and Indians squatty, squaws fat and greasy, bronze maidens passably “fair”; children, papooses, ponies, and dogs galore — with luggage lashed on long poles hitched to ponies in buggy-shaft fashion, with the rear ends dragging on the ground. The Indian travois. At four o’clock of a rather hot summer day, those Indians, unannounced, made camp at the old ford near the edge of town. Two of our influential townsmen—one professional, one artisan — invaded the Indian camp, and through speech, signs, or somehow, gleaned the information that the Indians were from Nebraska and were on their way to the Indian Territory. Come early bonfire-light that night, those two white men re-entered the Indian camp. They took along a Scotsman’s “wee bit” of the Indian’s “firewater,” but whether they unlawfully gave it to the braves or drank it themselves, was cloaked in silence. The charitable townspeople preferred to believe they drank it themselves—hence the mess. But the best “kid” analysis at the time favored the belief that the trouble had all come about through the white man’s ignorance of Indian etiquette—as with respect to bronze maidens passably “fair.”