German settlers, or the son of one, who invaded
the state after the rest of us had opened it up.

The Old Ridge Road went through Dyersville, Manchester, Independence,
Waterloo, and on to Fort Dodge--but beyond there both the road and--so
far as I know--the country itself, was a vague and undefined thing. So
also was the road itself beyond the Iowa River, and for that matter it
got to be less and less a beaten track all the way as the wagons spread
out fanwise to the various fords and ferries and as the movers stopped
and settled like nesting cranes. Of course there was a fringe of
well-established settlements a hundred miles or so beyond Fort Dodge, of
people who, most of them, came up the Missouri River.

Our Iowa wilderness did not settle up in any uniform way, but was
inundated as a field is overspread by a flood; only it was a flood which
set up-stream. First the Mississippi had its old town, away off south of
Iowa, near its mouth; then the people worked up to the mouth of the
Missouri and made another town; then the human flood crept up the
Mississippi and the Missouri, and Iowa was reached; then the Iowa
valleys were occupied by the river immigration, and the tide of
settlement rose until it broke over the hills on such routes as the Old
Ridge Road; but these cross-country streams here and there met other
trickles of population which had come up the belts of forest on the
streams. I was steering right into the wilderness; but there were far
islands of occupation--the heft of the earliest settlements strongly
southern in character--on each of the Iowa streams which I was to cross,
snuggled down in the wooded bottom lands on the Missouri, and even away
beyond at Salt Lake, and farther off in Oregon and California where the
folk-freshet broke on the Pacific--a wave of humanity dashing against a
reef of water.

Of course, I knew very little of these things as I sat there, ignorant
as I was, looking out over the grassy sea, in my prairie schooner, my
four cows panting from the climb, and with the yellow-haired young woman
beside me, who had been wished on me by the black-bearded man on leaving
the Illinois shore. Most of it I still had to spell out through age and
experience, and some reading. I only knew that I had been told that the
Ridge Road would take me to Monterey County, if the weather wasn't too
wet, and I didn't get drowned in a freshet at a ferry or slewed down and
permanently stuck fast somewhere with a