I took several more looks. The town was being torn down and carted
away. The balloon-frame buildings were coming apart section by section.
I could see at least a hundred teams and wagons carting lumber,
furniture, and everything that made up the town over the prairies to
the eastward.
My pupil at buffalo hunting was Dr. Webb, president of the town-site
company of the Kansas Pacific. After I had ridden away without
listening to his explanations he had invited the citizens of Rome to
come over and see where the new railroad division town of Hays City was
to be built. He supplied them with wagons for the journey from a number
of rock wagons that had been lent him by the Government to assist him
in the location of a new town. The distance was only a mile, and he got
a crowd. At the town site of Hays City he made a speech, telling the
people who he was and what he proposed to do. He said the railroad
would build its repair-shops at the new town, and there would be
employment for many men, and that Hays City was destined soon to be the
most important place on the Plains. He had already put surveyors to
work on the site. Lots, he said, were then on the market, and could be
had far more reasonably than the lots in Rome.
My fellow-citizens straightway began to pick out their lots in the new
town. Webb loaned them the six-mule Government wagons to bring over
their goods and chattels, together with the timbers of their houses.
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