The buffalo, driven from the East by the white man's advance and from the West by the red man's pursuit, had congregated in these pasture lands. The herds numbered thousands upon thousands, diminishing in the distance to black dots on the fawn-colored face of the prairie. Twice a day they went to the river to drink. Solemnly, in Indian file, they passed down the trails among the sand hills, worn into gutters by their continuous hoofs. From the wall of the bluffs they emerged into the bottom, line after line, moving slowly to the water. Then to the river edge the valley was black with them, a mass of huge, primordial forms, from which came bellowings and a faint, sharp smell of musk.

The valley was the highway to the West - the far West, the West of the great fur companies. It led from the Missouri, whose turbid current was the boundary between the frontier and the wild, to the second great barrier, the mountains which blocked the entrance to the unknown distance, where the lakes were salt and there were deserts rimed with alkali. It stretched a straight, plain path, from the river behind it to the peaked white summits in front.

Along it had come a march of men, first a scattered few, then a broken line, then a phalanx - the winners of the West.

They were bold men, hard men, men who held life lightly and knew no fear. In the van were the trappers and fur traders with their beaver traps and their long-barreled rifles. They went far up into the mountains where the rivers rose snow-chilled and the beavers built their dams. There were mountain men in fringed and beaded buckskins, long haired, gaunt and weather scarred; men whose pasts were unknown and unasked, who trapped and hunted and lived in the lodges with their squaws. There were black-eyed Canadian voyageurs in otter-skin caps and coats made of blankets, hardy as Indian ponies, gay and light of heart, who poled the keel boats up the rivers to the chanting of old French songs. There were swarthy half-breeds, still of tongue, stolid and eagle-featured, wearing their blankets as the Indians did, noiseless in their moccasins as the lynx creeping on its prey.

And then came the emigrants, the first white-covered wagons, the first white women, looking out from the shade of their sunbonnets. The squaw wives wondered at their pale faces and bright hair. They came at intervals, a few wagons crawling down the valley and then the long, bare road with the buffaloes crossing it to the river and the occasional red spark of a trapper's camp fire. In '43 came the first great emigration, when 1,000 people went to Oregon. The Indians, awed and uneasy, watched the white line of wagon tops. "Were there so many pale faces as this in the Great Father's country?" one of the chiefs asked.

Four years later the Mormons emigrated. It was like the moving of a nation, an exodus of angry fanatics, sullen, determined men burning with rage at the murder of their prophet, cursing his enemies and quoting his texts. The faces of women and children peered from the wagons, the dust of moving flocks and herds rose like a column at the end of the caravan. Their camps at night were like the camps of the patriarchs, many women to work for each man, thousands of cattle grazing in the grass. From the hills above the Indians watched the red circle of their fires and in the gray dawn saw the tents struck and the trains "roll out." There were more people from the Great Father's country, more people each year, till the great year, '49, when the cry of gold went forth across the land like a trumpet call.