22 KANSAS AND THE COUNTRY BEYOND.

out in the morning I shall meet the party at Abeliene, halfway
between this and Junction City, and return with them.

The Smoky Hill, in flood, has all the characteristics of a great
river—rising day after day after the rain has ceased and the ground
become dry —and certainly this morning it has the appearance of a
great river. Its heavy volume of water, of the same color as the Mis-
souri, rolls onward, in a smooth but by no means slow current. So
far as heard, the railroad has sustained no serious damage. This
flood is the greatest that has occurred on this river for nine years.
The Solomon, which comes in about twelve miles below, is higher
than it was ever known to be.

THE QUESTION OF ROUTES.

At this place the Santa Fe trade at present concentrates. Wagons

drawn by oxen, and manned by Mexicans, are almost continually to
be found at the railroad station. These Mexicans are singular-look-
ing beings, as swarthy as Indians, and many of them have the Indian
features more or less strongly marked. Dull, good-natured, but pro-
foundly ignorant, they move about their work like machines. They
are quite cheerful, and the soft and musical tones of their language or
patois are in strong contrast with the strong and harsh utterances of
their Anglo-Saxon brethren of the Denver trade.
*: I meet out here many intelligent men who are more or less familiar
with New Mexico. Although broken up by mountains, it has many very
fine valleys, fertile and beautiful, and they all unite in representing it
as immensely rich in minerals, especially gold and silver. But they
say that it is impossible that either the agricultural, the pastoral, or
the mineral wealth of that territory can ever be developed until it is
united with the rest of the country by rail. To work its mines
requires ponderous machinery, which it is simply impossible to trans-
port by the existing means of conveyance; and even agriculture must
be carried on in the most primitive modes until a railway shall bring
the improved implements of the day into that isolated and benighted
region.

But even more important than all these is the opening of the
avenue through which shall flow into that degraded and dark-
minded population the lights of true Christian civilization. Both
priests and people have fallen so low that nothing but influences from
without can be instrumental in raising them up. They are now our
fellow-citizens, as well as our fellow-men, and as such they have claims
upon us which we may not lightly ignore.

With the lights we now have no one can pretend to estimate how