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![handle is hein.slavery/ridthknzs0001 and id is 1 raw text is:
ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTS. No. 20.
A RIDE THROUGH KANZAS.
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.
[The following letters were originally published, with the signature of Worcester, in the
New York Tribune.]
I. - NEBRASKA CITY.
NanAsKA Cr, Sept. 12, 1856.
Nebraska City is a handful of one-story cabins, interspersed with an
equal number of magnificent distances, all beautifully situated on a bluff
overlooking the muddy Missouri. It has one or two groves of tim-
ber about it, and there are noble woods on the rich bottom-land across
the river. The village itself, like other Western villages, has a tavern
and three or four land offices, and the principal pursuit of the inhab-
itants consists in sitting on the doorsteps of these structutes, waiting for
real estate to rise. It does rise, however, very fast, and the name of the
settlement may be more veracious at some future time. At present, in
this region, if a place is tolerably large, it is called a town. If other-
wise, something must be done for it, and it is christened Something
City.
This is a good way into the Far West. From childhood I had learned
by Worcester's Geography that Council Bluffs was the extreme verge of
the imaginable horizon. When at last the stage rolled me in there, I
felt as strangely as a little boy on the Canada Railway, who, as the con-
ductor shouted the name of the little village of London, sprang up, half
awake, behind me, exclaiming, D Io we really pass through LONDON,
that great city!
Set it down as a genqral rule that all statements of Iowa Kanzas Com-
mittees in regard to stage routes are incorrect; and in fact those of
everybody else, for the only fixed rule of the Western Stage Company is
to do nothing to-day, as it was done yesterday. And as each driver
goes but ten or fifteen miles, and knows nothing beyond his own route,
and as the agent at each end hardly knows that, it is impossible to state-
at any given moment what will be done. When the stage ought to go,
it stops, and when it should stop, it goes. No wonder, then, if Kanzas
Committees are wrong, when nobody is right. But it may save some
disappointment if I say that there is not a single direct stage route across
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