It was a new annual wagon train which I now met rolling westward.

Such were times and travel not so long ago.
Little enough had come of my two years' journey out to Oregon.

Like to the army of the French king, I had marched up the hill and then marched down again.

As much might have been said of the United States; and the same was yet more true of Great Britain, whose army of occupation had not even marched wholly up the hill.

So much as this latter fact I now could tell my own government; and I could say that while Great Britain's fleet held the sea entry, the vast and splendid interior of an unknown realm was open on the east to our marching armies of settlers.