loaded down with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely
could be seen. It carried five human occupants--an Iowa farmer
and his family. They had been out to California for a season.
Casually they had left Los Angeles, had traveled north up the
valleys of California, east across the summit of the Sierras, and
were here now bound for Iowa over the old emigrant trail!

We hailed this new traveler on the old trail. I do not know
whether or not he had any idea of the early days of that great
highway; I suspect that he could tell only of its present
motoring possibilities. But his wheels were passing over the
marks left more than half a century ago by the cracked felloes of
the emigrant wagons going west in search of homes. If we seek
history, let us ponder that chance pause of the eastbound
family, traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of the
graves of the travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone.
What an epoch was spanned in the passing of that frontier!



Chapter VII. The Indian Wars

It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages
that, although we undertook to speak of the last American
frontier, all that we really thus far have done has been to
describe a series of frontiers from the Missouri westward. In
part this is true. But it was precisely in this large, loose, and
irregular fashion that we actually arrived at our last frontier.
Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced by any steady
or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating