the earth itself, a dugout or a sodhouse, the walls built up of strips of prairie sod turned over by the plow, the roof often covered with marl, or natural lime, as it was called, from the bottom of the prairie draw. Here, with his wife and children, lived in the first hard years the homesteader, under the vast sky, girt about by an immense and remote horizon. And not alone did the homesteader use the sod wherewith to rear his residence and out-buildings; the "prairie lumber yard" had public uses also. The first schoolhouse for the settlers' children was built of sod, and in the settlement of Jewell county, a fort of sod fifty yards square, with walls seven feet high and four feet thick, was built; and within the enclosure was dug the first well in the county.

At first the buffalo in their migrations came near, wandering up to the settler's door, but as the vast herds which had furnished the Indians with food and clothing for untold centuries, without apparent diminution, retreated westward, he followed them, making an annual campaign against them in his wagon, which he loaded with meat. When there was nothing left of them save their bleaching bones, he gathered these up and hauled them to the distant railroad station, where they accumulated in great white piles. Thus he added to his slender store of ready money. From Hays City, in May, 1875, the shipments of bones amounted to twenty tons a day.

194. Election of Senators.-The Legislature of 1867 re-elected Samuel C. Pomeroy to the United States Senate, for the long term, and for the short term elected Edmund G. Ross, who had been appointed by Governor Crawford to fill the unexpired term of James H. Lane.

195. James H. Lane.-On the evening of Sunday July 1, 1866, General James H. Lane, while riding in a carriage with Mr. McCall and Captain Adams, on the Government farm at Fort Leavenworth, sprang from the vehicle as it stopped at a gate, uttered the words, "Good-bye, Mac," placed the muzzle of

a pistol to his mouth and fired. The ball passed directly through the brain and emerged from the upper center of the cranium. With this terrible wound he survived for ten days, at times apparently conscious, dying at 11.55 A. M. of Wednesday, July 11, 1866. At the time of his death, General Lane was serving his second term as a United States Senator from Kansas, and was in the prime of his years.

James H. Lane.

In his lifetime, the year and place of his birth was a matter of controversy. In a list of the members of the Topeka Constitutional Convention he is enrolled as a native of Kentucky, thirty-three years of age, and a lawyer by profession. He was born at Lawrenceburg, Ind., on the 22d of June, 1814. He was the son of Amos Lane, first Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives, and a judge and member of Congress from that State. His mother was of an old and honorable New England family. At thirty years of age, he enlisted as a private in the Third Indiana Volunteers, to serve in the Mexican War. He was promoted to the colonelcy of the regiment, displayed conspicuous gallantry at Buena Vista, and later commanded. the Fifth Indiana Volunteers. After the war he was elected Lieutenant-Governor of Indiana, Presidential Elector-at

Large, and a member of the Congress which passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, for which he voted.

In 1855, the year after the passage of that Act, he came to Kansas and to Lawrence. His latest biographer, and devoted and intimate friend, Hon. John Speer, speaks thus of the event:

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One bright morning in April, 1855, as Lane was passing with his team over the hill where the State University now stands, he halted and walked into the little hamlet now called Lawrence, named but without a charter, carrying a jug to fill with water to pursue his journey westward, but meeting a man named Elwood Chapman, who offered to sell him a 'claim,' he purchased and ended his journey.' He entered the town which was to be his home and the field of an eventful and distinguished career, a Democrat from Southern Indiana, who had voted in Congress for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On the 14th of August, 1855, he participated in what is spoken of by the annalist as the first convention in Lawrence of Free State men of all parties," and from that time forward he was what he later avowed himself, a crusader of freedom." Tireless, indefatigable, alert, full of audacity, endless in plans and resources, he was everywhere, in war, in peace, in combat, in diplomacy, in battle and treaty. He was early an advocate of the "Topeka Government," the first organized effort for the admission of Kansas as a Free State. was a member of the Free State Executive Committee, of which Charles Robinson was chairman. He reported the platform of the Big Springs Convention; he was President of the Topeka Constitutional Convention. When Kansas appealed to the North he became a national character; he

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He

was called "Jim Lane, of Kansas." In April, he addressed the Legislature of Pennsylvania at Harrisburg; in May, he spoke to a great meeting in Chicago, where $15,000 was raised for Kansas.

When Kansas became a State of the Union, he was elected, after a memorable struggle, one of the first United States Senators; and then came the great Civil War, in which he exhibited that strange blending of qualities, capacities and dispositions, which belonged to him alone. He raised whole brigades, and commanded one of them in the field, even without a commission. He retained all through the period of storm the confidence of the commander-in-chief of our armies, as well of the head of the State. He saw the last of the fighting on the Kansas border.

In 1865, he was re-elected United States Senator almost without opposition.

A year later, as a Senator, he advocated the policy of President Johnson, and broke with Kansas. He made a bold fight for his long supremacy. It seemed, at times,

that he would win it back, but he knew at last that there was nothing to hope. Those who knew him best said that the thought drove him to madness and to death.

He was a remarkable man. In the strange power of his speech there has been no other like him in Kansas. He made many enemies, but attached friends to himself as with hooks of steel, who remember him only as the 66 Crusader of Freedom."

The vacancy in the United States Senate, occasioned by the death of General Lane, was filled temporarily by the appointment, on the 20th of July, 1866, by Governor

Samuel J. Crawford, of Hon. Edmund G. Ross, who was subsequently elected by the Legislature to fill the unexpired term of Senator Lane. Senator Ross had served the State, in the field, in the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, attaining the rank of Major and brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and was one of the framers of the Wyandotte Constitution. He remained in the Senate until 1871.

SUMMARY.

1. The Homestead law giving bona fide settlers 160 acres of land, passed May 20, 1862.

2. Large grants of land were given to the A., T. & S. F., the Union Pacific, and other railroad companies.

3. The railroads gave wonderful impetus to immigration, proving one of the greatest factors in the development of Kansas.

4. The Pioneers, the Pilgrim Fathers of Kansas.

5. Samuel C. Pomeroy re-elected, and Edmund G. Ross elected to the United States Senate.

6. The death of General James H. Lane removes from Kansas a remarkable and distinguished personality.