First the Mississippi had its old town, away off south of Iowa, near its mouth; then the people worked up to the mouth of the Missouri and made another town; then the human flood crept up the Mississippi and the Missouri, and Iowa was reached; then the Iowa valleys were occupied by the river immigration, and the tide of settlement rose until it broke over the hills on such routes as the Old Ridge Road; but these cross-country streams here and there met other trickles of population which had come up the belts of forest on the streams.

I was steering right into the wilderness; but there were far islands of occupation--the heft of the earliest settlements strongly southern in character--on each of the Iowa streams which I was to cross, snuggled down in the wooded bottom lands on the Missouri, and even away beyond at Salt Lake, and farther off in Oregon and California where the folk-freshet broke on the Pacific--a wave of humanity dashing against a reef of water.
Of course, I knew very little of these things as I sat there, ignorant as I was, looking out over the grassy sea, in my prairie schooner, my four cows panting from the climb, and with the yellow-haired young woman beside me, who had been wished on me by the black-bearded man on leaving the Illinois shore.

Most of it I still had to spell out through age and experience, and some reading.

I only knew that I had been told that the Ridge Road would take me to Monterey County, if the weather wasn't too wet, and I didn't get drowned in a freshet at a ferry or slewed down and permanently stuck fast somewhere with all my goods.
"Gee-up," I shouted to my cows, and cracked my blacksnake over their backs; and they strained slowly into the yoke.

The wagon began chuck-chucking along into the unknown.
"Stop!" said my passenger.