satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries,
land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples
fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes
seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail;
politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors
hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way
to everywhere; lawyers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the
Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers
hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers "hunting
country"--a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of
birth. Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville,
Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms
toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by
the forces of civilization itself.

I saw the old mining country from Mineral Point to Dubuque, where lead
had been dug for many years, and where the men lived who dug the holes
and were called Badgers, thus giving the people of Wisconsin their
nickname as distinguished from the Illinois people who came up the
rivers to work in the spring, and went back in the fall, and were
therefore named after a migratory fish and called Suckers; and at last,
I saw from its eastern bank far off to the west, the bluffy shores of
Iowa, and down by the river the keen spires and brick and wood buildings
of the biggest town I had seen since leaving Milwaukee the town
of Dubuque.

I camped that night in the northwestern corner of Illinois, in a regular
city of movers, all waiting their turns at the ferry which crossed the
Mississippi to the Land of Promise.