It is May 22, 1849.

Alonzo Delano, a storekeeper from Ottawa, Illinois, is in a wagon train in the midst of the prairie which, in eighteen years, will become the state of Nebraska.

It is the seventh week of his overland trip to California, where he hopes the climate will cure his tuberculosis.

From Alonzo’s memoir:

A little before noon we saw the grass-covered sand hills which bounded the valley of the Platte [River].

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