MANHA TTAN. 7

they flap their swift but apparently lazy way up the
winding river to some favorite sand-bar, where they
will pass the night, until the first grey streak of dawn
warns them to depart to the wheat-field, their favorite
feeding place. See! there comes a flock of fifty or
more, just visible over the tops of the cottonwoods
that line the river bank; now one drops suddenly
from the flock, and then I hear, reverberating from
bluff and crag, the bur-rung of a heavy gun.

A little farther on, as we approach Manhattan, a
pack of over thirty pinnated grouse, or prairie chickens,
as they are known here, fly up at the noise of the
train and skim away a couple of hundred yards, when
they alight again in the long grass. Myriads of quail
are also to be seen, and I make up my mind that
this is the “El Dorado” of the gunner, the sportsman’s
paradise.

We now stop a moment at Manhattan, situated at
the confluence of the Kaw and Blue rivers. It is the
county seat of Riley County, and has a population of
about 1,500. This town was first settled in 1854, by
a colony from Ohio, all the members of which were
well educated, and nearly all members of the Metho- -
dist Episcopal Church, thus giving the place at its
start an intellectual and religious character which it
has since sustained. ‘They are said to have migrated
from Cincinnati in a small steamer which they pur-

 

chased for the purpose. They steamed down the Ohio,
up the Mississippi, up the Missouri, and then up the
Kansas river to the mouth of the Big Blue. That was

 

=e OO