There was a time when every Western man, still restless, still unsettled, still under the mysterious west-bound impulse, thought in terms of Oregon and California. No wall could have stopped these men. No political doctrine could have restrained them. As well try to regulate the sweep of the tides of ocean, equally mysterious, equally irresistible. This great road of the prairies and the mountains, more than two thousand miles long, and level, smooth and easy, even though it crossed a continental divide—this unengineered triumph of engineering—lay directly at hand as the natural pathway of the American people. It was the longest highway of the world, unless that may be the trail of the convicts of Siberia, to reach whose terminus in the fullness of time this great trail of the American freemen seems to have been devised. It was the route of a national movement—the emigration of a people “seeking to avail itself of opportunities that have come but rarely in the history of the world, and will never come again.” As has been stated, the overland trail to Oregon began, as did the Santa Fé trail, at the town of Independence, on the Missouri River. The two trails were the same for forty-one miles, when, as the able historian of the fur trade remarks, a simple sign board was seen which carried the words, “Road to Oregon.”[41] The methods of these old men were very direct and simple. There was small flourish about this little board, whose mission was to point the way across these miles of wild and uninhabited country! There were branch trails that came into the road from Leavenworth and St. Joseph, striking it above the point of departure from the Santa Fé trail; but the Oregon trail proper swung off from this fork, running steadily to the northwest, part of the time along the Little Blue River, until at length it struck the valley of the Platte, which was so essential to its welfare. The distance from Independence to the Platte was three hundred and sixteen miles, the trail reaching the Platte “about twenty miles below the head of Grand Island.” The course thence lay up the Platte valley to the two fords, about at the Forks of the Platte, four hundred and thirty-three or four hundred and ninety-three miles. Here at the Forks was a point of departure in the old days. If one chose to follow the South Fork of the Platte, he might bring up in the Bayou Salade, within reach of the Spanish settlements and the head of the Arkansas, as we may see in reading of La Lande and of Purcell and of Ashley, and of the later traders; or he might take the other arm and come out on the edge of the continental Divide much higher up to the north.