And so we did not celebrate one October day with all of our children and grandchildren and friends coming to offer us gold coins, gold-headed canes—­which I do not use—­and gold-rimmed glasses for eyes that see farther and clearer than my spectacled grandsons at the university can see to-day.  We made a golden summer of the thing and followed where, like a will-o’-the-wisp of memory, the Santa Fe Trail of threescore years ago reached from the raw frontier at Independence on to the Missouri bluffs, clear to the sunny valley of the Holy Faith.

Only a headstone at long intervals shows the way now—­a stone that well might read: 

     Here ran the old Santa Fe Trail.  This stone, set here, is sacred to
     the memory of the Vanguards of the Plains who followed it.

They stand, these “markers” now, on hilltops and in deep valleys; by country crossroads and where main streets cut each other in the towns and villages.  They ornament the city parks, they show where splendid concrete bridges, re-enforced with structural steel, span streams that once the ox-teams doubled and trebled strength to ford.  They gleam where corn grows tall and black on fertile prairies; where seas of wheat have flooded barren, burning plains, and perfumey alfalfa sweetens the air above what was once grassless desolation.  They whisper of a day gone by among the silent mountains, where tunnels let the iron trail run easily under the old trail’s dizzy path.  They nestle in the shadows of gray-green cliffs and by red mesa heights; until the last monument, sacred to the memory of a day forgotten, speaks at the corner of the old Plaza in the heart of Santa Fe.

That was a journey long to be remembered—­the long, golden-wedding journey of Gail Clarenden with his wife, Eloise St. Vrain, and all of it was sweet with memories of other days.  Not in peril and privation and uncertainty did we follow the trail now.  The Pullman has replaced the Conestoga wagon, dainty viands the coarse food smoke-blackened over camp-fires, and never fear of Kiowa nor Comanche broke our slumber.  The long shriek that cuts the air of dawn was not from wild marauders on a daybreak raid down lonely canons, but from the throats of splendid, steel-wrought engines swinging forth upon their solid, certain course.

The prairies still lap up to the edges of the little town of Burlingame, whose main street is still the old trail’s path.  The well has long since disappeared from the center of the place.  Where once the thirsty gathered here to drink, there stands a monument sacred to the memory of the old trail days.  And sacred, too, to the memory of the one far-visioned woman, Fannie Geiger Thompson, who first conceived the thought of marking for the coming generations the course of commerce that built up the West in years gone by.

We never lived in Burlingame, where once—­a heart-hungry little boy—­I longed to have a home.  But the Krane children and their children’s children still make it an abiding-place for us.