THE LAND CLAIM;
A STORY OF THE UPPER MISSOURI.
CHAPTER I.
FATHER AND DAUGHTER.
Away, away toward the almost trackless plain stretched the rolling prairies. The Indian Territory had given way before the advancing hosts of civilization, and surveyors, speculators, locaters, squatters, traders and adventurers gathered where the red-man had been, to found new States. Nebraska and Kansas became familiar names; and, as the Pawnees, the Owahas, the Ottoes, the Kickapoos, the Puncas, disappeared like shadows, the tide of restless, eager, insatiable "pale-faces" poured in to make the Indian wilderness to blossom with a new life. The grand old river, coming from the unexplored and mythic regions of the Rocky Mountains, poured its flood through plain and forest, through bluff and bottom, to bear on its bosom the new civilization which it was to serve with the best elements of health, wealth and peace. From its sides spread the avenues of settlement, and villages sprung up like magic to stand as buoys guiding the settler to the new regions beyond, where plains were still unstaked and timber bottoms still unclaimed.
Among those who sought the Nebraska country, at an early moment after its opening for settlement, was Thomas Newcome. Though hailing from Connecticut, he was an Englishman, and had sought the West," not more to better his fortunes than to gratify an uneasy and reckless spirit, little fitted for the observations and restraints of a New England community. His history had been tinged with the romance—which, unfortunately for happiness and good order is too frequently the truth—of a mesalliance: he had won the love of an artless girl, the daughter of a noble family which he served as gardener, and, with her, had fled to America. The mere child-wife of his deception learned her error only too late, and lived long enough to taste the bitterness of poverty as well as the more poignant sorrow of unkindness at the hands of the cruel and unforgiving man she was forced to call husband. The act of desertion had not only alienated her friends and family, but her fortune—the prize which Newcome had most coveted—was disposed of to
