But now these dog colonies are gone; the buffalo has gone; the antelope has disappeared; as likewise the Indian. Now all is changed. Instead of the parched plain we saw in 1852, with its fierce clouds of dust rolling up the valley and engulfing whole trains until not a vestige of them could be seen, we see the landscape of smiling, fruitful fields, of contented homes, of inviting clumps of trees dotting the landscape. The hand of man has changed what we looked upon as a barren plain to that of a fruitful land. Where then there were only stretches of buffalo grass, now waving fields of grain and great fields of corn send forth abundant harvests. Yes, we may again exclaim, "What wondrous changes time has wrought."
At Grand Island I shipped to Fremont, Neb., to head the procession celebrating the semi-centennial of founding that city, working the ox and cow together; thence to Lincoln, where the first edition of "The Ox Team" was printed, all the while searching for an ox or a steer large enough to mate the Dave ox, but without avail. Finally, after looking over a thousand head of cattle in the stock yards of Omaha, a five-year-old steer was found and broken in on the way to Indianapolis, where I arrived January 5, 1907, eleven months and seven days from date of departure from my home at Puyallup, 2,600 miles distant.
Upon my arrival in Indianapolis, people began to ask me about the Trail, and to say they had never heard that the Oregon Trail ran through that city, to which I replied I never had heard that it did. A quizzical look sometimes would bring out an explanation that the intent of the expedition was as much to work upon the hearts of the people as to work upon the Trail itself; that what we wanted was to fire the imagination of the people and get them first to know there was such a thing as the Oregon Trail and then to know what it meant in history.
After passing the Missouri, and leaving the Trail behind me, I somehow had a foreboding that I might be mistaken for a faker and looked upon either as an adventurer or a sort of a "wandering Jew" and shrank from the ordeal. My hair had grown long on the trip across; my boots were some the worse for wear and my old-fashioned suit (understood well enough by pioneers along the Trail) that showed dilapidation all combined, made me not the most presentable in every sort of company. Coupled with that had I not already been compelled to say that I was not a "corn doctor" or any kind of a doctor; that I did not have patent medicine or any other sort of medicine to sell, and that I was neither soliciting or receiving contributions to support the expedition? I had early in the trip realized the importance of disarming criticism or suspicion that there was graft or speculation in the work. And yet, day after day, there would come questions, pointed or otherwise, evidently to probe to the bottom to find out if there was lurking somewhere or somehow an ulterior object not appearing on the surface. There being none, the doubters would be disarmed only to make way for a new crop, maybe the very next hour.