occupied by white settlers. No further back than I85I, at the time of my return from the Great Council, held on the borders of the Platte or Nebraska river, the plains of Kansas were almost entirely without inhabitants, containing only a few scattered villages of Indians, living for the most part by the chase, by fishing and on wild fruits and roots. But eight years have made an entire change: many towns and villages have sprung up, as it were, by enchantment; forges and mills of every kind are already very numerous; extensive and beautiful farms have been established in all directions with extraordinary rapidity and industry.
The face of the country is entirely changed. In 1851, the antelope, the wild deer and the wild goat bounded at liberty over these extensive plains, nor is it much longer ago that these fields were the pasture of enormous herds of buffaloes; to-day they are in the possession of numerous droves of horned cattle, sheep and hogs, horses and mules. The fertile soil rewards a hundredfold the labors of the hus
bandman. Wheat, corn, barley, oats, flax, hemp, all sorts of garden stuff and all the fruits of the temperate zone, are
produced there in abundance. Emigration tends thither, and commerce follows in its tracks and acquires new importance every day.
Leavenworth is the principal town of Kansas Territory. It contains already about Io,ooo souls, though it has sprung into existence within the last six years. It is beautifully
and advantageously situated on the Missouri river. It has a bishop, two Catholic churches, a convent with a boarding
school and a day-school. There are already fifteen churches, twenty-three stations, sixteen priests, five religious communities, and four manual-labor schools for the Osage and Potawatomi Indians, which are under the care of our fathers and religious ladies of different orders.
The greater portion of the Territory is not thickly wooded: the surface of the country, as a general thing, is rolling and well adapted to agriculture; it is not unlike the billows of a vast ocean, suddenly arrested in its flow and