Jeffrey Champlin
Unfortunately we have pictures of neither Jeffrey Champlin nor his brother. The family was a very old one in Yates County, having been associated in the early days with the Universal Friend and her band of religious separatists.
The young man was about 25 when he decided to spend the winter of 1860-1861 in Kansas. It's not known if he intended to move there permanently or whether he was, in effect, taking a vacation.
It's also not know how he traveled, though he could have taken a train, and probably did. A few years later the railhead towns in Kansas were the destination of millions of cattle driven in herds from Texas. Travelers who wanted to travel still farther west would have ridden the train to Independence or St. Joseph in Missouri, or Topeka in Kansas, and then joined a wagon train on one of the trails. This era ended for all practical purposes in 1869 when the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific Railroad and joined the nation across its middle.
