I thought at times that all the people in the world had gone crazy to move west.

We took families, even neighborhoods, household goods, live stock, and all the time more and more people.

They were talking about Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, and once in a while the word Iowa was heard; and one family astonished us by saying that they were going to Texas.
The Mormons had already made their great migration to Utah, and the Northwestern Trail across the plains to Oregon and to California took its quota of gold-seekers every year.

John C.Fremont had crossed the continent to California, and caused me to read my first book, _The Life of Kit Carson_.
Bill, who never could speak in hard enough terms about sailing on the mud-puddle Lakes, which he had never done as yet, once went to Pittsburgh, meaning to go from there down the Ohio and up the Missouri.
He had heard of the Missouri River fur-trade, and big wages on the steamboats carrying emigrants from St.Louis up-stream to Nebraska, Iowa and Dakota Territory, and bringing back furs and hides.

But at Pittsburgh he was turned back by news of the outbreak of cholera at New Orleans, a disease which had struck us with terror along the canal two or three years before.