This episode is sponsored by Mount Athos, results, purity, and sustainability in every bottle. Just planes. On and on west of the Mississippi, there's only planes for a life's eternity of wandering.

Such a vast canvas of land didn't suit the Tennessee man all too well. He was used to trees.

Trees cloaked by and by in the morning with the mist characteristic of the smokies.

He didn't realize the comfort that came from all the cover.

At times, as a boy, he would work himself into a fright when camping in the woods.

He felt closed in by the forest.

He thought himself claustrophobic then, and it would almost send him into a proper start.

But as he crossed the blank white plains of seemingly nothing but dust and chaparral,

he realized he'd only just discovered real claustrophobia.

With nothing around him at all but slate ground and blue sky, he felt naked.

He imagined it to be how Adam and Eve felt when they

heard God walking along in the cool of the garden's day, searching for them. How could so much

space make one feel so boxed in? It was only his more steeled manhood nerves that kept him from

losing his mind with the overwhelming emptiness. Each river or creek

crossing of his wagon train became the most exciting thing he'd ever experienced before. For most

of the banks had grooves of trees that provided precious breaks in the prairie. The water was somehow

a lesser concern to him. So it was that Henry Harkins made the slow trek across the

arid or otherwise tall, grassy plains of North America in 1863, eventually just hoping the rumor

of mountains somewhere west had not been a joke pulled on him. He finally concluded that he'd

believe in the mountains only when he started to climb their foothills.

He could no longer imagine how anything other than dust and grass and short brush fauna could exist in that part of the world.

Perched on a hill, he could look all around him and see for what seemed to him hundreds of miles in any direction.

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