An almost continuous stream of wagons stretched for five hundred miles, along the great highways over the mountains.

Is it any wonder that the Indians who came down to Fort Laramie with Peter DeSmet in 1852, when they looked upon the great wide bare trail, should imagine that there must be a great void in the east, and could not comprehend that this was only a small fragment of the white race? Is it any wonder that the

Sioux bands that came for the first time to Fort Mitchell should ask if the whole white village was moving to the west? Is it any wonder that they contemplated taking the back trail of the Great White Medicine Road, with a view of locating in the valley that they thought must be deserted in the east? And this travel continued and grew. It gave rise to the pony express and the overland stage, which modes of travel and transportation continued until the Union Pacific builded up the Lodgepole valley and became the rapid transit across the mountains.

And now Fort Mitchell had become the rendezvous for trappers, as well as a halting place for overland travelers. It was here that trapping parties disbanded and went their several ways, and it was here they met to journey to the white settlements.

When a number had made ready for the trip eastward they would take boats or horses, and with the voice of the wilderness, and with the yodling calls of the mountains, they would make the rocks and cliffs of old Scotts Bluff reverberate, and then, they were away.