About me were men bound for Oregon, for California, for the Plains, and not a few whose purpose I took to be partisanship in the border fighting between slavery and free soil.

It was in the West, and on the new soils, that the question of slavery was really to be debated and settled finally.
The intenseness, the eagerness, the compelling confidence of all this west-bound population did not fail to make the utmost impression upon my own heart, hitherto limited by the horizon of our Virginia hills.

I say that I had entered upon this journey against my will.

Our churning wheels had hardly reached the turbid flood of the Missouri before the spell of the frontier had caught me.

In spite of sadness, trouble, doubt, I would now only with reluctance have resigned my advance into that country which offered to all men, young and old, a zest of deeds bold enough to banish sadness, doubt and grief..