rough this river of news, and of the little bit
of a net with which I fished it for information.

All this time the stream of emigration and trade swelled, and swelled
until it became a torrent. 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. That summer there were medicine pedlers working
on all the boats, selling a kind of stuff they called "thieves' vinegar"
which was claimed to be a medicine that was used in the old country
somewhere by thieves who robbed the infected houses in safety, protected
by this wonderful "vinegar"; and only told how it was made to save their
lives when they were about to be hanged. A man offered me a bottle of
this at Rochester, for five dollars, and finally came down to fifty
cents. This made me think it was of no use, and I did not buy, though
just before I had been wondering whether I had not better borrow the
money of Captain Sproule; so I saved my money, which was getting to be a
habit of mine.

California, the Rockies, the fur-trade, the Ohio Valley, the new cities
up the Lakes and the new farms in the woods back of them, and some few
tales of the prairies--all these voices of the West kept calling us more
loudly and plainly every year, and every year I grew stronger and more
confident of myself.

The t