The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. Schooling he received at the hands of his father. The first book that he could remember was Frémont's _Explorations_, read aloud to the family by the father until all knew it literally by heart, maps and all. Lured by its enthusiastic descriptions and by reports of a former pupil who had gone to Oregon and by the new act of Congress which gave to every homesteader six hundred and forty acres of land free, on March 17, 1852, with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride," the family set out across the wild continent of America. "The distance," he records, "counting the contours of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as nature had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day before." That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful dangers, its romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its constant demand for self-dependence, made an indelible impress on the young lad. It was a journey of Argonauts, one of the thousands of journeys that made picturesque a whole epoch. He has described it in some of the most stirring of his poems. All through his poetry occur stanzas like this: What strength! what strife! what rude unrest! What shocks! what half-shaped armies met! A mighty nation moving West, With all its steely sinews set Against the living forests. Hear The shouts, the shots of pioneer, The rending forests, rolling wheels, As if some half-checked army reels, Recoils, redoubles, comes again, Loud-sounding like a hurricane. He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His dedicatory preface to _The Ship in the Desert_, London, 1876, is a poem of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this: