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chatted until we reached the water’s edge.
    When our turn came for the ferry, Pa and Uncle Will drove the wagons onto the big wooden platform made of boards and propelled by men with long poles. The ferrymen pushed off, and in a moment, we were on the muddy water, making our way to the other side of the Mississippi. I stared upstream, watching for trees in the current that would overturn the raft, then turned and looked at the Illinois shore as it got smaller and smaller.
    “What do you think of this for an adventure?” Pa asked.
    I wanted to tell him it was scary, that I was afraid one of the oxen would bump up against me and push me into the river. The water was so dirty, no one would ever see me if I went under. But I didn’t want to admit I was afraid, so I asked, “Does Colorado have big rivers like this?”
    “Only the Platte, but it isn’t much of a river, a mile wide but only an inch deep, they say,” Pa told me.
    “Then I wouldn’t mind falling into it,” I told him.
    “Hold on to the wagon wheel. It’s chained to the ferry. Don’t you worry, Emmy Blue. These river rats know what they’re doing,” he told me, and pointed with his chin to the two men in charge of the raft.
    I turned and watched the Missouri side of the river come closer and closer, until finally we bumped against the shore. Pa and Uncle Will led the oxen off the ferry, and before I knew it, we were looking for a campsite.
    “Ho for Colorado!” Pa said. I didn’t respond this time. Like Aunt Catherine, I was beginning to get tired of hearing that.
    Pa said we were making good time through Missouri, going twelve or fifteen miles a day. Horses would have gone faster, but oxen were better suited for the Great Plains, even if they were slow and too stupid to swat flies with their tails. Another advantage, Pa said, was that while the Indians might shoot oxen, they wouldn’t steal them because they had no use for them. Even Aunt Catherine laughed at the idea of an Indian man on an ox, riding across the prairie.
    “Wouldn’t they eat them?” I asked.
    “They’d have to be awfully hungry,” Pa replied.
    Aunt Catherine perked up after we crossed the Mississippi. Every day she was happier and more helpful, and she even made jokes, asking, “If we just crossed Mrs. Sippi, where do you suppose Mr. Sippi has got to?”
    Uncle Will slapped his knee and laughed. The joke wasn’t all that funny. I think he was just glad that Aunt Catherine was back to her old self.
    Aunt Catherine began doing some of the cooking, telling Ma, “Now, Meggie, you know you shouldn’t overdo it. Save your strength. You’ll need it.”
    “What’s wrong with you, Ma?” I asked.
    “Oh, I’m fine, Emmy Blue. Don’t you worry about me.”
    Pa said to enjoy the trip while we could, because it would get harder once we were through Missouri and across the Missouri River. “These are easy days,” he said, and they were. The road was smooth, with farms along the way. Sometimes we stopped at barnyard wells to water the stock, and the farm wives invited us to rest a spell.
    The farmers gathered around the wagons and asked Pa and Uncle Will where they were going. “You been to Colorado before? You find a mine, did you?” one asked.
    “Why, I’d give you this whole farm for just one bucket of Pike’s Peak nuggets,” another farmer said.
    At a farm where several children played, a girl about my age asked me, “You like going west?”
    “It’s better than threading needles for Ma’s quilting group,” I told her.
    The girl giggled. “I don’t care for that, either. What’s it like riding in a covered wagon?”
    “I walk with Pa most of the time,” I said, feeling grown up. “Who wants to sit on a seat as hard as a milking stool all day?”
    “I guess you like it right well.”
    “I guess I do.”
    Ma and Aunt Catherine talked with the women. “Why’d you agree to uproot and go to Colorado?” one asked them.
    Ma replied, “We thought we’d have