Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway the railroad took for its own.  Some of these wagons passed still onward, uncontent.  Others swerved and scattered over the country to the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies.  One by one, here and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and had come far to win.

Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the strange driftwood which was then afloat.  Though the chutes at the railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who now began to see their own cattle to be doomed.  The main herd of the buffalo was now reported to be three or four days’ drive from Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud complaints.  The skin-hunting still went on.  Great wagons, loaded with parties of rough men, passed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where they might still find their prey.  The wagons came creaking back loaded with bales of the shaggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places.  Some of the skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless beginning of a permanent society.  Not sinless was this society at its incipiency.  In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary concomitants.  Sinless men would form a community at best but perishable.  Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly love so named—­all these things were to come later, as they have ever done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.  Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of such a beginning of our prosperity.  Having become slaves, we scoff at the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was a master.  Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own.  There were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were happy.  Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.