They were passing from the Prairies to the Plains.
Shouts and cheers arose as the word passed back that the sand hills known as the Coasts of the Platte were in sight.

Some mothers told their children they were now almost to Oregon.

The whips cracked more loudly, the tired teams, tongues lolling, quickened their pace as they struck the down-grade gap leading through the sand ridges.
Two thousand Americans, some of them illiterate and ignorant, all of them strong, taking with them law, order, society, the church, the school, anew were staging the great drama of human life, act and scene and episode, as though upon some great moving platform drawn by invisible cables beyond the vast proscenium of the hills..