But if so, why the crude bivouac?
Why the gear of travelers?
Why the massed arklike wagons, the scores of morning fires lifting lazy blue wreaths of smoke against the morning mists?
The truth was that Jesse Wingate, earlier and impatient on the front, out of the very suppression of energy, had been trying his plow in the first white furrows beyond the Missouri in the great year of 1848.

Four hundred other near-by plows alike were avid for the soil of Oregon; as witness this long line of newcomers, late at the frontier rendezvous.
"It's the Liberty wagons from down river," said the campmaster at length.

"Missouri movers and settlers from lower Illinois.

It's time.

We can't lie here much longer waiting for Missouri or Illinois, either.