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- Paul Garrett/Narrator: In the middle years of the 19th century more than 350,000 immigrants moved along the Platte River from the Missouri to the Pacific. The great majority passed through Indian lands and fewer than 300 came to harm, a percentage smaller than those killed accidentally by their own rifles. There have been few mass migrations so peaceful and no previous instance in which people of one race passed through lands held by another with so little trouble.