while the stream itself was covered with ducks and geese.  During the days of travel by the old trail, at the crossing-place was a primitive ferry.  The current was always very strong, and when the fork was much swollen, dangerous.  The region watered by the Loup Fork is unsurpassed in fertility by any other portion of the valley of the Platte.  After crossing the stream, the Union Pacific’s track is a perfectly straight line, and when the fields are golden with the harvests, the view from the train is the most marvellous agricultural landscape to be found anywhere on the continent.

A few miles westward, beyond Grand Island, is Wood River, a noted landmark and camping-place for those who followed the tide of immigration to Utah, and to the gold fields of California, in 1849.  It was always a pleasant spot, and is now a station on the Union Pacific Railway.  As the tourist crosses the bridge over the stream in a palace car, he may look down from his window, and meditate on the brilliancy of the present, and the misty past, with all its adventures and suffering.  The march of civilization has made wonderful changes in fifty years.  It has forced the Indians, the buffaloes, and the antelopes away from the prairies, and in their places comfortable homes may now be seen on the sites of old camps.  The pretty little stream still runs its race to the Platte, and lingering near the bank at the old ford, murmurs its story of the long ago, as the train rushes by.

After passing Grand Island, the next place of importance between the flourishing town of Columbus and North Platte is that known as Brady’s.

Brady’s Island honours the memory of an old-time trapper, who was brutally murdered by one of his partners in 1847.  They were engaged in their vocation as employees of the American Fur Company, on the many tributaries of the Platte, and their camp at the time was on the island that bears the unfortunate man’s name.  The tradition says that the little coterie of trappers had landed there to pack their accumulation of the season’s furs for the market of St. Louis, then the only place where they could be disposed of in the whole West.

The day when everything was about ready for embarkation down the river to the Missouri, in a rude boat which they had constructed of buffalo-hides drawn over a framework of poles, Brady and one of the men were in the camp alone—­the others were at work on the bank of the stream.  Brady and the one who was left in the camp that morning were ever on bad terms with each other, and more than once had indulged in some severe quarrels.

When the rest of their party returned to the camp preparatory to starting, they found Brady dead, lying in a pool of his own blood.  His partner, when questioned as to the cause of his death, affirmed that he was accidentally killed by the premature discharge of his own rifle, which he had been carelessly handling.