He showed me how to test the wind, to read tracks and scat, and to be as patient and ghostly as winter itself. He taught me to field dress an animal when it was too big to carry, to shoot a rifle without toppling over, and to find dry wood in the snow. At night, we scraped hides in front of our tent while the fire crackled and our clothes steeped in wood smoke, and he regaled me with tales of his own father, who headed west and spent years on the Ohio frontier in search of adventure and fortune.

Sure, I was little, but I was smart enough to understand the wistfulness in my daddy’s voice. That’s why Mama let him do wild things without complaint—like take his nine-year-old daughter on a hunting trip. Because the kind of man who fled Boston to make a new life in Indian country was the kind of man who might just keep on going. If Mama didn’t let him sow some wild oats, maybe he’d do something wilder. Maybe he’d go west.

So it’s now, with my own fire crackling, my lips greasy with the squirrel I just ate, and the night echoing with the distant yip of a coyote that I miss Daddy most. He should be here with me. We should have been on this adventure together.

On April 1, 1849, I reach Independence. I crest a rise, and there she is, stretching wide and strange below me.

My first impression is of mud. It spatters off horse hooves and wagon wheels, stains the base of every building and the legs of every pair of trousers, mixes with half-melted snow to create a soup of gray and brown. The few buildings making up the town proper are painted muddy white or muddy red. Centered before the largest of these is the one bright spot: an American flag, whipping proudly from a high pole. It’s the new one, with a full thirty stars.

Surrounding the town are acres of tents and wagons, thousands of oxen and horses; even a few hasty shacks, spread over a vast, flat landscape of mud and snow. And beyond it all is a slow, muddy river, curving gently into the horizon and shimmering like gray silk in the early spring sun.

I’m not sure what I expected. A neat town square like Dahlonega’s. An empty corner with no one in sight but Jefferson McCauley, standing there with his hands in his pockets and a welcoming grin on his face.

I spend all day wandering, getting to know the lay of the land. I’ve never seen so many people all in one place. I’m bumped and jostled everywhere I go, and it’s a peculiar thing to be so crowded and so alone at the same time.