James Butcher was going to Denver with a freighting train, and he with myself agreed to go in the same train for mutual convenience.
The President, Abraham Lincoln, had ordered a draft, and many young men in Missouri had found themselves in a sore strait.

In the South were their kindred, and they felt that they could not and would not fight against their own flesh and blood; and to avoid this they determined to flee to the gold mines in the mountains, where every man did what was right in his own eyes--and so they came to Atchison or Leavenworth and engaged to drive these freighting teams to Denver.
Many of them were sons of rich fathers, well educated, and had never engaged in manual labor, much less in such menial work as this, and when these proud and high-spirited fellows felt what an ignoble life they had been reduced to, the reader may well believe they did not feel good-natured over it.

And now, when these young gentlemen came to understand that they were to be associated with a man that was reported to be the representative of the hated Yankees, who had made war on the people of the South, and set free their slaves, they bitterly attacked me in wordy warfare.

Of course I defended myself.
And so day after day, in the intervals while our cattle were grazing, we debated every question relative to slavery that has been debated within the last fifty years.

Their hearts were bitter; they were passionately excited, and would often end the talk, which they themselves had begun, With noisy profanity.