I.

A GLIMPSE OF KANSAS.

LAWRENCE, KANSAS, June 8, 1866.

WHOEVER visits Kansas has the choice of two routes from St. Louis, — the North Missouri Railroad to St. Joseph, and the Pacific Railroad to Kansas City. The former is three hundred and five miles long, and the trains run at the rate of twelve and a half miles an hour; the latter has a length of two hundred and eighty-three miles, and a speed of fifteen miles an hour is attained. The former has the advantage of sleeping-cars (" palaces," I believe, is the western term — at least in advertisements), the latter of finer scenery. Having had a dismal experience of the former road some seven months ago, I chose the latter, and have been well repaid.

In the United States, railroads avoid the finest scenery, the best agricultural regions. This is especially the case in the West, where settlement followed the rivers and the old emigrant roads, forming belts of tolerably thorough cultivation, between which the country — even in Indiana and Ohio — is still comparatively rude. It is only within a few years that railroads have begun to lead, instead of follow settlement, and the line may soon be drawn beyond which they will represent the most rapid growth and the best cultivation.

This reflection was suggested to me while observing the country opened. to the traveller’s view by the Pacific Railroad, between St. Louis and Jefferson City. There are but three points which are at all picturesque, — the wooded and rocky banks of the sparkling Meramec, and the mouths of the beautiful Gasconade and Osage Rivers, —and none which exhibit much more than the primitive stage of agriculture. Yet the upland region, a few miles south of the line of the road, is, I am told, rich, well-farmed, and lovely to look upon.

Even when one reaches the Missouri, there is little in that ugliest of all rivers to divert one’s attention. A single picture of the swift tide of liquid yellow mud, with its dull green wall of cotton-wood trees beyond, is equivalent to a panorama of the whole stream. For the seventy or eighty miles during which we skirted it, the turbid surface was unrelieved by a sail, unbroken by the paddles of a single steamer. Deserted, monotonous, hideous, treacherous, with its forever-shifting sands and snags, it almost seems to repel settlement, even as it repels poetry and art.

I travelled as far as Jefferson City in worshipful society,— five handcuffed burglars, three of whom had been Morgan’s guerrillas. One of them, in utter opposition to all theories of physiognomy, strongly resembled a noted reformer. As the other passengers, in referring to incidents of the war, always said "Rebels" instead of "Confederates," I inferred that their political condition was healthy. Emigration is still rapidly pouring into the State, and, as a young man from one of the way-stations said, —" If we were only all Black Republicans, we‘d soon have the first State in the West."

When the road leaves the river, it enters one of the loveliest regions in the United States. The surface is a rolling prairie, yet with a very different undulation from that of the rolling prairies of Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. The swells are longer, with deeper and broader hollows between, and the soil appears to be of uniform fertility. On either side the range of vision extends for eight or ten miles, over great fields of the greenest grass and grain, dotted here and there with orchards, and crossed by long, narrow belts of timber, which mark the courses of streams. ‘I’he horizon is a waving purple line, never suddenly broken, but never monotonous, like that of the prairies east of the Mississippi. Hedges of Osage orange are frequent; the fields are clean and smooth as a piece of broadcloth; the houses comfortable, and there is nothing to be seen of that roughness and shabbiness which usually marks a newly settled country. I have seen nothing west of the Alleghanies so attractive as this region, until I left Leavenworth this morning.

In the neighborhood of Sedalia, four or five hundred farmers, mostly from Ohio, have settled within the past year. I hear but one opinion in regard to the country south of the railroad, extending from the Osage River to the Arkansas line. Climate, soil, water, and scenery are described in the most rapturous terms. One of my fellow-passengers, pointing to the beautiful landscapes gradually unrolling on either hand, said, —" This is nothing to it !" Yet I was well satisfied with what I saw, and feasted my eyes on the green slopes and swells until they grew dark in the twilight.

On reaching Kansas City, the train runs directly to the levee, and the traveller is enabled to go directly on board the Leavenworth boat, thus escaping the necessity of stopping at the hotel. I was very grateful for this fact, and having already seen the forty miles of cotton-wood and yellow mud between the two places, took my state-room with an immense sensation of relief. We reached Leavenworth at nine o’clock, in three days and ten hours from Philadelphia.

This is the liveliest and most thriving place west of the Mississippi River. The overland trade has built it up with astonishing rapidity, and it now claims to have a population of 25,000. Kansas City, its fierce rival, having suffered more than one blockade during the war, Leavenworth shot into sudden prosperity; but now that trade has returned to its old channels, Kansas City expects to recover her lost ground. It is a subject of great interest to the people of the two places, and many are the speculations and predictions which one hears from both sides. As to the present ascendancy of Leavenworth, however, there is no question. The town has both wealth and enterprise, and its people seem to me to be remarkably shrewd and far-seeing. In the course of three or four weeks the two places will be connected by a railroad which follows the west bank of the Missouri.

The Union Pacific Railroad (Eastern Division) opened its branch road to Lawrence in May, and trains now run regularly upon it, connecting with the main line for Topeka and San Francisco. One of my objects in visiting Colorado being to take a superficial view of both railroad routes to the Rocky Mountains, I decided to go out by way of Fort Riley and the Smoky Hill, and return along the Platte to Omaha, in Nebraska. My first acquaintance with the Pacific Railroad, therefore, commenced in Leavenworth. The train starts from a rough piece of ground outside of the town, follows the bank of the Missouri for six or eight miles, and then strikes inland through a lateral valley.

Here commence my new experiences. I have never before been west of the Missouri River. Let me now see what is this Kansas which for twelve years past has been such a noted geographical name — which has inspired some thousands of political speeches, some noble poems, and one of the worst paintings that mortal eye ever beheld. The very repetition of a name, even in the best cause, sometimes becomes a little wearisome. I frankly confess I have so often been asked, "Why don’t you visit Kansas?" that I lost almost all desire of visiting Kansas, Now, however, I am here, and will see what there is to be seen.

We gradually rose from a bottom of rather ragged-looking timber, and entered a broad, sweeping, undulating region of grass. Cattle were plenty, pasturing in large flocks, and there were occasional log-cabins, great fields of corn where the thrifty blades just showed themselves above a superb growth of weeds, and smaller patches of oats or wheat. Everybody complained of the incessant rains, and this accounted for the weedy condition of the fields. The soil appeared to be completely saturated, and the action of the hot sun upon it produced almost visible vegetable growth.

Here I first witnessed a phenomenon of which I had often heard, — the spontaneous production of forests from prairie land. Hundreds of acres, which the cultivated fields beyond had protected against the annual inundation of fire, were completely covered with young oak and hickory trees, from four to six feet in height. In twenty years more these thickets will be forests. Thus, two charges made against Kansas seemed to be disproved at once, — drought and want of timber, the former being exceptional, and the latter only a temporary circumstance.

The features of the landscape gradually assumed a certain regularity. The broad swells of soil narrowed into ridges, whose long, wavelike crests generally terminated in a short step, or parapet, of limestone rock, and then sloped down to the bottom-lands, at angles varying from 20° to 30°. Point came out behind point, on either side, evenly green to the summit, and showing with a wonderfully soft, sunny effect against the sky. Wherever a rill found its way between them, its course was marked by a line of timber. The counterpart of this region is not to be found in the United States; yet there was a suggestion of other landscapes in it, which puzzled me considerably, until I happened to recall some parts of France, especially the valleys in the neighborhood of Epernay. Here, too, there was rather an air of old culture than of new settlement. Only the houses, gardens, and orchards were wanting.

As I leaned on the open windows of the car, enjoying the beautiful outlines of the hills, the pure, delicious breeze, and the bright colors of the wild-flowers, the bottom-lands over which we sped broadened into a plain, and the bluffs ran out to distant blue capes. Along their foot, apparently, the houses of a town showed through and above the timber, and on the top of the further hill a great windmill slowly turned its sails. This was Lawrence. How like a picture from Europe it seemed!

A kind resident met me at the station. We crossed the Kaw River (now almost as muddy as the Missouri), and drove up the main street, one hundred feet wide, where the first thing that is pointed out to every stranger is the single house left standing, when the town was laid in blood and ashes, in August, 1863. Lawrence has already completely arisen from her ruins, and suggests nothing of what she has endured. The great street, compactly built of brick, and swarming with traffic; the churches, the scattered private residences, embowered in gardens; the handsome college building on the hill, indicate long-continued prosperity, rather than the result of nearly ten years of warfare. The population of the town is now about 8000.

This afternoon my friends took me to Mount Oread (as I believe the bluff to the west is named), whence there is a lovely view of the Wakarusa Valley. Mexican vaqueros were guarding their horses on the grassy slopes, and down on the plain a Santa Fe train of wagons was encamped in a semicircle. Beyond the superb bottoms, checkered with fields and dotted with farm-houses, rose a line of undulating hills, with here and there an isolated, mound-like "butte," in the south. It was a picture of the purest pastoral beauty.

A little further there is a neglected cemetery where the first martyrs of Kansas — Barbour among them — and the murdered of Lawrence lie buried. The stockades of the late war, and the intrenchments of the earlier and prophetic war, are, still to be seen upon the hill. So young a town, and such a history! Yet now all is peace, activity, and hopeful prosperity; and every one, looking upon the fair land around, can but pray that the end of its trial has been reached.  NEXT