have vanished with the vanquished. There is in human life no present-no to-day. It is all to-morrow with youth. It is all yesterday with age. Man is here on the earth, in the battle of life, not a volunteer but a conscript. He is essentially and potentially what his race made him. His ancestry determined his capacity to do, to suffer and to enjoy. Nurture and environment may modify this tendency or intensify that faculty-but nature alone determines by heredity and evolution just what education may do for each individual and fixes the limits to the leading out of intellects, by the intellects to be led out, as certainly as derivation fixes the origin of the word educate in he verb "educere, " to "lead out." Therefore the laws of heredity and evolution should be taught in the schools so that by their obedient observance humanity may improve physically and mentally. Then each family should keep a daily record within its own household-a home history. It should tell the sanitary, mental and moral condition of parents and children. Then from such domestic data-some generations hence-when humanity shall have been philosophically observing evolution and heredity for a few centuries, history may become a record of useful facts—and not a register of prejudice and romance. Then there will be for all mankind less of fortuity and more of certainty in all possible attainments, physical and mental. Reverting: This desultory sketch shows the influence of the ambition of Mr. Douglas in precipitating the civil war. It depicts the power which the death of Governor Burt exercised upon the existence of cities, the development of a state and the commerce of a continent. Those two personalities were, the first positively, the second negatively, the immediate cause of stupendous results. Neither of them consciously planned. Both apparently chanced. And yet had the human mind the power to trace, through analysis, the ancestry of those men to the beginning of their respective families, we should find-I have not even a little bit of doubt-each result, positive and negative alike, perfectly logical, inevitable and inexor able. When that power of ultimate analysis has been perfectly developed by evolution and heredity, history will be in justice and truth written wisely and well. But at present we can only dimly discern in the record of events, that there is a logic which "Sways the harmonious mystery of the world, Even better than prime ministers; Alas! Our glories float between the earth and heaven Still, like the cloud which drops on unseen crags May bless the cloud when it hath passed away!" THE FORT PIERRE EXPEDITION. [Observations on the Upper Missouri in 1855.] The following paper was read before the state historical society at its last meeting, January 13, 1891. "In the year 1855 Nebraska was a wild and uninhabited waste. Its resources were practically unknown. It had been condemned in advance of its white occupation by an ignorant public opinion as a desert. It was the almost exclusive home of the Indian, and of the buffalo, and other game upon which he subsisted. Omaha was a straggling little hamlet of cheap abodes in which dwelt people, who could have been counted by a few score scattered over a large area of virgin prairie. It bore the shabby aspect of a small deserted village. The Omaha Indians lived near Bellevue, at that time in their ancient village, but were long since removed to the reservation which they now occupy. Open war existed between them and the powerful Sioux. The most eminent of the Omahas, Logan Fontenelle, a man of superior character and courage, had been overtaken and killed by his old enemy in the previous year. The Pawnees, located near Columbus in those years, were also at war with the Sioux, and the broad valleys of the Platte and Elkhorn rivers were the Indian battlegrounds. These facts tended to kindle apprehensions in the imaginations of the early settlers who, even in Omaha, were often alarmed by reports of the approach of the Sioux, who were constantly accredited with murderous designs upon the town. It is within my Own easy memory to recall more than one occasion when the dwellers in the little Omaha of that early day would not have been much surprised to see a Sioux war party rushing over the adjacent hills in murderous array to make them the helpless victims of savagery and slaughter. Thirty-five years afterward I am able to affirm as a matter of confident belief that the Sioux then had as little thought of making a hostile descent upon Omaha as they have now. Our double safe-guard was that the Sioux had no desire to kill the white people who did not wrong and rob them, and that their fierce enemies, the Pawnees and Omahas, as brave and energetic and skillful in war as themselves, were our sufficient protection against possible forays. So far as my knowledge and recollection go, I doubt whether a Sioux warrior ever got nearer the Omaha settlement than the valley of the beautiful Logan creek in which, near its mouth, the battle was fought which resulted in the death of the valorous chief whose name it bears. But the citizens of the log-hutted and cotton-shantied hamlet gave rein to all those lively imaginations which traditions of Indian savagery naturally excite, and there were times when visions of hostile visits from the tomahawkers caused real fear among the most sober and courageous members of the little community. It was in the midst of scenes and conditions like these on what was then a remote frontier inhabited by a few defenseless people that, on a calm, warm day in the middle of June, 1855, whistles from the steam pipes of the two Missouri steamers drew pretty much everybody to the sandy shore of the river to find that the boats were filled with troops, a part only of a military expedition into the heart of the Indian country under the command of the late General W. S. Harney, the famous "Hero of Chapultepec," as he was sometimes called, but in direct charge of Captain P. S. Turnley, one of the most important and capable of the quartermasters of the union army during the civil war, who was also quartermaster of the river expedition. The actual commander of the flotilla was the late General H. W. Wessels, but he could not do much in the way of commanding on the water, because he preceeded the others to Ft. Pierre, which was the objective point for concentration, and all but two of four or five boats were out of reach of each other the greater part of the time. But there was very little commanding to do. The troops were of the old Second infantry, well disciplined and orderly, under the following officers en voyage: Captain P. T. Turnley, Captain C. L. Lovell, Captain D. Davidson and First Lieutenant Thomas W. Sweeney, since distinguished in the civil war and retired upon the rank of brevet brigadier-general for gallant service on the battlefields of the union. General Sweeney is an Irishman of cultivated mind, of charming social manners, and a born soldier. He lost an arm as a private at the battle of Cherubusco, Mexico, and was promoted from the ranks for conspicuous gallantry in action on that field. The officers thus named were on board the two steamboats, of which Captain Turnley had military charge, and which had landed at Omaha on that beautiful June day on account of cholera that prevailed among the troops. By some accident in orders the surgeon who was to have accompanied them failed to reach Fort Leavenworth in time to attend to this duty, and Captain Turnley was in search of some one to act as a substitute. He called upon Governor Mark W. Izard, then federal governor of the territory, for information about a young physician whom he had heard mentioned at the "Lower Council Bluffs Landing" of that day. Governor Izard and others told the truth, when they informed Captain Turnley, that it was a case of "Hobson's choice," as there was only one physician in this Omaha town. I was found by the officer soon afterwards, and was asked if I would accept the service and accompany the troops on the expedition to Ft. Pierre. The present honored president of the Nebraska historical society remarked in my hearing, in recent years, that it required some courage in those times for a civilian to go into the Indian country under the circum. stances then existing. This had never occurred to me before, but with the prevailing apprehensions, there may have been something in it. Assurances being given that I would not be absent from my alleged home more than ten days, on the 17th day of June, 1855, accompanied by my wife, I went on board the old and badly battered stern wheeler, the "William S. Baird," with no body in particular behind me save a few indifferent friends, and my father (the late Lorin Miller), with Indians in front of me and cholera all around me. Our welcome by the officers was made grateful by every attention that army hospitality knows so well how to bestow, and that from the troops, differing in motive from that of the officers, was one that led them to hope for relief from dangers from a terrible malady. Cholera in 1855 assumed the form of an epidemic along the traveled thoroughfares and in leading cities, and proved fatally malignant in many parts of our country. I was not afraid of it. I had seen and wrestled with his Asiatic majesty in 1849 as a medical student in Central New York, and had been well instructed in the |