You buy a ticket and leave that afternoon for Independence, Missouri, by rail. When you arrive, you find an entire economy based on travel and prospecting: hats and clothing, pans and satchels, medicines, tinder boxes, and books.

A prairie schooner pulled by two oxen

One ramshackle structure sells “gold insurance”, and another houses a mystic who’ll read your palm for twenty cents. Your skepticism increases as you walk toward the stage. Wisely, your money stays in your pocket.

Once aboard the schooner, you meet two young men from Brooklyn ready to get rich: John Moultrie, a barber, and his brother Jonah, a blacksmith. You swap stories of your lives back in the Empire State, and carry on with a young fellow from Kentucky named Marshall. The four of you hit it off like lifelong friends.

The food is terrible, the sleeping quarters stiff and creaky, but the stories and camaraderie offer tremendous encouragement.

After a week, the first stop is in Council Grove in the Kansas Territory, where, shopping for provisions, you meet a young lady named Margaret Painter from another traveling party. By the light of a wintry moon, the four of you resolve to find each other when you get to California.

Two days out of Council Grove, the path you’ve been traveling becomes unmarked, the uneven terrain jostling the wooden wheels outfitted to your wagon. Vegetation becomes scarce, then dies out completely.

Creeks have run dry. As you travel through the Kansas Territory, what roads you find are lined with dead cattle, their decay slowed by the winter’s chill. Burnt fragments of wagons and frontier tools litter your path.

“What kind of person would rather destroy his own property than leave it to a fellow traveler?” asks Jonah.

No one has an answer.

Click here to continue