The Westerners

A tourist of to-day, peering from the window of his vestibule train at the electric-lit vision of Three Rivers, as it stars the banks of the Missouri like a constellation against the blackness of the night, would never recognize, in the trim little modern town, the old Three Rivers of the early seventies. To restore the latter, he should first of all sweep the ground bare of the buildings which now adorn it, leaving, perhaps, here and there an isolated old shanty of boards far advanced toward dissolution. He would be called upon to substitute, in place of the brick stores and dwellings of to-day, a motley collection of lean-tos, dug-outs, tents, and shacks, scattered broadcast over the virgin prairie without the slightest semblance of order.