We buried pa on a sidehill out west of camp, buried him high up so his ghost could look down the trail he'd planned to travel.

We piled the grave high with rocks because of the coyotes, and we dug the grave deep, and some of it I dug myself, and Mr. Sampson helped, and some others.

Folks in the wagon train figured ma would turn back, but they hadn't known ma so long as I had.  Once she set her mind to something she wasn't about to quit.

She was a young woman and pretty, but there was strength in her.  She was a lone woman with two children, but she was of no mind to turn back.  She'd come through the Little Crow massacre in Minnesota and she knew what trouble was.  Yet it was like her that she put it up to me.

"Bud," she said, when we were alone, "we can turn back, but we've nobody there who cares about us, and it's of you and Jeanie that I'm thinking.  If we go west you will have to be the man of the house, and you'll have to work hard to make up for pa."

"We'll go west," I said.  A boy those days took It for granted that he had work to do, and the men couldn't do it all.  No boy ever thought of himself as only twelve or thirteen or whatever he was, being anxious to prove himself a man, and take a man's place and responsibilities.

Ryerson and his wife were going back.  She was a complaining woman and he was a man who was always ailing when there was work to be done.  Four or five wagons were turning back, folks with their tails betwixt their legs running for the shelter of towns where their own littleness wouldn't stand out so plain.

When a body crossed the Mississippi and left the settlements behind, something happened to him.  The world seemed to bust wide open, and suddenly the horizons spread out and a man wasn't cramped any more.  The pinched-up villages and the narrowness of towns, all that was gone.  The horizons simply exploded and rolled back into enormous distance, with nothing around but prairie and sky.

Some folks couldn't stand it.  They'd cringe into themselves and start hunting excuses to go back where they came from.  This was a big country needing big men and women to live in it, and there was no place out here for the frightened or the mean.

The prairie and sky had a way of trimming folks down to size, or changing them to giants to whom nothing seemed impossible.  Men who had cut a wide swath back in the States found themselves nothing out here.  They were folks who were used to doing a lot of talking who suddenly found that no one was listening any more, and things that seemed mighty important back home, like family and money, they amounted to nothing alongside character and courage.

There was John Sampson from our town.  He was a man used to being told to do things, used to looking up to wealth and power, but when he crossed the Mississippi he began to lift his head and look around.  He squared his shoulders, put more crack to his whip and began to make his own tracks in the land.