Work was over for the day in the white farmhouse.  It had been a hot, tiring day, in the rush to finish spring planting before the rainy season descended on southeastern Kansas.  As the sun dipped below the horizon, a breeze sprang up, rustling the leaves of the dusty old cottonwood with a refreshing sound.  The small boy seated on the top step of the porch sighed with content.  He found a peculiar, deep satisfaction in being alone and out-of-doors.
 The still early twilight revealed the child's face and figure.  The thick, close-cropped hair was reddish and showed a tendency to curl  over the finely shaped head with its broad, high forehead.  It was an intelligent, sensitive face, with a suggestion of suffering, of ill-health  that had sculptured the cheeks to hollowness, and accentuated the modeling of the firm mouth and chin.  But the peace of the evening stole into his being and his features relaxed into an expression of boyish happiness.
 The clatter of voices and dishes from the kitchen reminded him that the family were still at supper.  He had little appetite for the slice of bread and butter with which he must begin each meal at his father's insistence.  But this was before the day of dietetics, and his dislike of what the rest of the family ate with relish was attributed to a streak of stubbornness rather than to its true cause—a weak digestion.  He had tried to choke down the food put before him, but without success, and, at a nod from his mother, had slipped away unnoticed.
 The boy was Enos Mills and the year was 1884.  As he sat alone in the oncoming darkness he was dreaming of faraway Colorado—that land of promise for the prospector, the trapper, the hunter, and mountain explorer.  For which occupation, he wondered, would he be fitted?  Of pioneer parents, who had tracked from South Bend, Indiana, to Iowa with an ox-team in the '50s, then shortly moved on to Kansas, he had been brought up to the rigors of hardship and toil.  For farming, he realized, he was scarcely suited, that a life in the open where he could be on his own—
 His dreaming was interrupted by a voice in the doorway:
 "You there, Tom?"
 "Yes, Ma."  He answered to the nickname which was used by the family to distinguish him from his father, whose name had been given him at his birth, April 22, 1870.
 Mrs. Mills slipped noiselessly into a low rocker and began to hum softly to herself.  The boy came and leaned against her knee, for this was the one hour of the day they could talk together, while his sisters cleared away the suppers things and his father was busy with the papers brought once a week from Fort Scott, 20 miles away.
 "Ma, tell me about Colorado," implored the boy, unwilling to waste a minute of the precious time.
 "Now, Tom, what makes you keep thinking about the Rockies; ain't it nice enough right here in the cool of the evening?  How those crickets are chirping!  Well, let's see, what do you want I should tell you?"
 "About that time you and Pa went up the gulch prospecting and you met a big grizzly coming down."
 "How you do remember, child!  I guess you could almost tell it yourself," his mother chuckled softly, enjoying the enthusiasm of the boy resting against her.
 "There were tall pine trees swaying in the breeze and you were watching the big white clouds moving across the bright blue sky," Enos continued, to recall her memory.
 "Yes, and your pa used to say I never would find gold if I didn't stop picking wildflowers.  But each one was more beautiful than the last: blue, gold, red, purple flowers growing wild all over those mountains -- how I loved them!  We had planned to pitch camp beside a beautiful mountain stream, but thought we would look around a bit.  I wish you could just taste that wonderful pure mountain water; it makes me right thirsty just to think of it.  And how the stars shown at night, after we rolled up in our blankets!"  Her thoughts wandered off to twenty-five years before, when as a girl in her early twenties she had followed her husband in the gold rush of '59 to the mountains of Colorado.
 “Breckenridge, wasn’t it, Ma?  Are they still prospecting there, do you think?  Is there any work a boy my age could do?”
 “It’s no work for a boy, Tom, prospecting ain’t.  Even your father gave it up after a few months.  With all that digging, he said, a body might as well be plowing Kansas prairies.  Crops were surer than outcrops to his way of thinking.  But that mountain air sure is fine, and such appetites as we had!  I believe even you would be able to eat out there.  Seems to me you’re getting thinner and thinner the way you pick at your victuals.”
 “I ain’t hungry, Ma; seems like something tells me not to eat when I don’t want to.”
 “I know, but you won’t grow if you don’t eat.  And your father expects you to do a man’s work, though you ain’t as big even as a twelve-year-old boy.  Maybe it would be better for you to go to Colorado.  There’s lots doing out there now according to all accounts, folks going out for the scenery and hunting.  There ought to be work of some kind.  And you’d like it fine, those high peaks piled with snow, glowing like rubies when the sun first strikes them.”
 He stood straight, his hands clenched in a sudden determination.  “That’s what I think, too.  And I’m going, going tomorrow!”
 The conversation was interrupted by his sisters joining them.
 “What’s Horace doing, Bell?” asked Mrs. Mills.
 “El’s helping him with his arithmetic.”
 Mrs. Mills rose, giving Enos a pat on the arm.  She was a frail-looking woman, small of stature, weighing less than a hundred pounds, but wiry and active and of unbounded endurance.
 “You girls rest a spell.  I’ll go put little Joe to bed, if he ain’t already asleep by now.  Beats all how the time goes.”  She went into the house singing softly to herself, as she thought of her big family, four girls and three boys.  The youngest, Enoch Joe, now nearly five, was later to follow his brother to Colorado.  Of a happy disposition, Mrs. Mills did not worry overmuch about young Enos, knowing instinctively that his destiny was beyond her controlling.  Hers was not a nature to hold her children too closely to her, once their longing reached beyond the home nest, and Enos especially had ever been restless among this brood of noisy, chattering children, seeking solitude in the quiet of the prairie reaches whenever he could steal the time away from farm duties.
 Sarah and Bell soon tired of the darkened landscape and, the meager news of the day exhausted, followed their mother into the house and joined the family circle under the hanging kerosene lamp.  There was always sewing to be done in this big family and the evenings were profitably employed.
 Naomi lingered on the porch with Enos.
 “Were you and Ma talking about Colorado?” she presently asked.
 “Say, Sis, do you think a boy my age could get work out there?” he questioned eagerly.
 “That’s just what I wanted to tell you.  I have the address of a summer place where people go to hunt and fish and enjoy the mountains.  Here it is; ‘Estes Park’ is the name of it,” handing him a slip of paper.  “Keep that and, when you get a chance to go, maybe it will be worth knowing.”
 “Thanks, Sis.  I’ll ask when I get to Denver City how to go there.  I’m sure I’ll be better in Colorado than here.  And I’m not much help, anyway, except with horses.  Pa says I do have a real knack with them.  If I didn’t have to miss so much school I wouldn’t mind the work.  Can I take some of those schoolbooks of yours, so I can study when I get to feeling better?  A boy has to have an education if he gets ahead in the world.”
 “Shucks, child, you don’t need to worry.  ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ you know.  I believe you’ll make your way all right.  When do you think you will go?”
 “Tomorrow, perhaps.”
 “Tomorrow,” echoed his mother from the doorway.
 The boy turned and their eyes met in a long look, bright with the glitter of tears.  But a smile was on the woman’s lips as she turned back into the house.  Deep within her she was content.

 When next day the sun rose, sending long shadows over the still sleeping land, it shone on a small figure plodding northward, a bundle on his back that held all his possessions, a few articles of clothing, the cherished books, and a lunch of fried chicken and dried fruit which his mother knew he liked.  It was some ninety miles to Kansas city, toward which the boy had set his face, in the hope of finding work until he could save enough to buy a ticket to Denver City.  He was going to the Rockies and the idea carried him on.  His was the indomitable spirit of pioneer Kansas.
 As early as the beginning years of the fifties, the early influx of settlers into the State consisted to a large degree of people possessed by an idea, the idea of human freedom; they wanted no slaves on Kansas soil.  They fought for that principle as whole-heartedly, as fiercely, as they fought the climate when it turned against them, as it often did, bringing a year or years of drought after seasons of rain and fruitfulness.  Terrific winters came after burning summers, but the stout-hearted endured, conquering even the elements, turning the prairie into wheat and cornfields, raising horses and cattle, building substantial homes, planting trees on those treeless plains, digging wells so deep no drought could exhaust them.  The farms reached back to villages; these grew to towns; schools were established for the growing children that they might be better educated than the hard-pressed elders had been; meeting-houses gathered the Godfearing to hear the Word.  A fanatical people, possibly, but willing to suffer and to work for their ideas and their ideals; proud of the land to which they had come, learning to love it for the very difficulties with which it opposed them.
 Enos was setting his short stride against Fate.  He was taking the first steps on the long trail that was to lead him, not only to the summit of the highest peaks in his country, but to heights of achievement and renown that would have appeared, from that farm and springtime of 1884, far more inaccessible.
 The days passed, not unpleasantly for Enos.  It was great to be in the open alone, and where there was no hurry and no need to eat if he wasn’t hungry.  Sometimes he had a supper and bed in a farmhouse, helping with the chores so numerous around evening, and which he knew so well.  Sometimes he had a lift of a few miles in a farm wagon, and good advice in the bargain.
 “So you’re trampin’ to Denver City?  Better take a shotgun to keep off the Injins!”
 “Oh, I ‘spect I could scare ‘em without that,” Enos would answer.
 For two days he took shelter out of pouring rain in a friendly farmhouse, where he was pressed to stay longer if he wished.  He was handy around the house, inside as well as out, and willing beyond reason.  He had no hard-luck story to tell; rather he spoke of amusing or interesting happenings along the way, his impressions of the changing scenery and the flowers and birds that never escaped him.  When he declared his destination as Colorado, the elderly couple were especially interested.  Their son had gone to the Rockies, and they hoped sometime to join him.  In parting they gave Enos the address of friends in Kansas City who might help him find work.
 And so it proved.  Although it was several days before he was able to located a job as a baker’s errand boy, they helped him find his way around the city, which was a bit terrifying to a country lad, unfamiliar with the hustle and bustle of the streets.  He found the baker exceedingly strict and particular, and he was called down pretty sharply for the slightest mistake.  But it was all good training, and he never made the same mistake twice.
 Eventually, he walked proudly out of the railroad station with a ticked to Denver City in his pocket.  The realization that he was actually to ride on the train was almost more than he could believe.  He walked block after block in his excitement, then fearing lest he would miss the train started to run back to the station.  He still had an hour to wait, and with nothing else to occupy his time, took out his copy of the Manual of the Constitution of the United States, by Israel Ward Andrews, “Designed for the Instruction of American Youth in the Duties, Obligations, and Rights of Citizenship.”
 “All-aboard!” brought him quickly to his feet.  And in the next moment, it seemed, the train whistled, jerked, started.  He drew a long breath, pulled his head inside the window, and settled in his seat.  He was on his way to the Rockies!
 

Copyright 2000, Enos Mills Cabin, Temporal Mechanical Press
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