about to enter an Indian country, and that the dusky residents did not always fancy the idea of strangers richer than themselves passing through, and sometimes showed out some of the bad traits the Indians had been said to possess.  It would therefore be better to organize and travel systematically.  He would divide the company into divisions and have each division choose a captain, and the whole company unite in adopting some rules and laws which they would all agree to observe.  This arrangement was satisfactorily accomplished, and they moved out in a sort of military style.  And then they launched out on the almost endless western prairie, said then to be a thousand miles wide, containing few trees, and generally unknown.

These Illinois boys were young and full of mirth and fun which was continually overflowing.  They seemed to think they were to be on a sort of every day picnic and bound to make life as merry and happy as it could be.  One of the boys was Ed Doty who was a sort of model traveler in this line.  A camp life suited him; he could drive an ox team, cook a meal of victuals, turn a pan of flap-jacks with a flop, and possessed many other frontier accomplishments.  One day when Doty was engaged in the duty of cooking flap-jacks another frolicsome fellow came up and took off the cook’s hat and commenced going through the motions of a barber giving his customer a vigorous shampoo, saying:—­“I am going to make a Jayhawker out of you, old boy.”  Now it happened at the election for captain in this division that Ed Doty was chosen captain, and no sooner was the choice declared than the boys took the newly elected captain on their shoulders and carried him around the camp introducing him as the King Bird of the Jayhawkers.  So their division was afterwards known as The Jayhawkers, but whether the word originated with them, and John Brown forgot to give them credit, or whether it was some old frontier word used in sport on the occasion is more than I will undertake to say; however the boys felt proud of their title and the organization has been kept up to this day by the survivors, as will be related further on.

The first few days they got along finely and began to lose all feeling of danger and to become rather careless in their guard duty.  When the cattle had eaten enough and lain down, the guards would sometimes come into camp and go to sleep, always finding the stock all right in the morning and no enemy or suspicious persons in sight.  But one bright morning no cattle were in sight, which was rather strange as the country was all prairie.  They went out to look, making a big circuit and found no traces till they came to the river, when they found tracks upon the bank and saw some camps across the river, a mile or so away.  Doty had a small spy glass and by rigging up a tripod of small sticks to hold it steady they scanned the camps pretty closely and decided that there were too many oxen for the wagons in sight.