ARRIVAL AT LAWRENCE. 31

dwelling of the settler must be carried forward. The log-cabin can
never be an institution here, and the ranch is no place for women
and children. Let the Government, then, by generous subsidies, push
on this great work, and every dollar expended will be returned four-
fold in national wealth and national revenue within the present gen-
eration. Even were there no San Francisco, no California, no Pacific
Ocean to reach at the other end, the building of this road would be a
wise and beneficent measure, and an enduring crown of glory to the
men who shall accomplish it, whether in their capacity of statesmen
or of capitalists, and to the generation in which it shall be consum-
mated.

LETTER VII.—<Arrival at Lawrence— Flood in the Smoky Hill and
Kansas.

LAWRENCE, Kansas, June 20, 1867.
I ARRIVED at this beautiful and historic little city yesterday after-
noon, as I am slowly heading eastward. Of this place I shall speak at
another time.

FLOOD IN THE SMOKY HILL AND KANSAS.

On the afternoon of Friday, the 7th, just after the main body of our
party, including all the ladies, had left some twenty of us at Fort
Harker, over 220 miles west of the Missouri, we had a very violent
hurricane. About midnight we had another. General Hancock told
me that in twenty-five years’ experience on the plains he had never
witnessed so heavy a gale as that of the afternoon. But of this bois-
terous night I think I have already spoken.

Tleft Fort Harker about eight o’clock on Saturday morning, and
reached Salina in the afternoon in the contractor’s car attached to a
construction train—very pleasant, but slow. I dined in the car with
R. H. Shoemaker, Esq., and other gentlemen, to whom I am indebted
for many courtesies. But the heavy rain of Friday night, and the
almost unparalleled torrents of Saturday, flooded the country and
turned every channel of surface water into an improvised river. I
never saw such rain as that.

I could go no further than Salina that evening. A train attempted
to go down on Sunday morning, but was partially wrecked at a broken
culvert a few miles below town, and the few passengers had to get
back the best way they could. I did not attempt it, hoping that the
regular train would be able to go out on Monday morning. But in
this I was disappointed. It was not the swellings of the Smoky Hill
that prevented the train from running on Monday, but the unexampled