And, yet, it fell to me to warn of the toil. To warn of the caricatures of resourcefulness that do not touch the reality of survival in the face of 2,000 miles across such terrain! I wrote a guide that warned of those perils and more! I hocked a ware that only a man with the willpower to find such resources as he never knew he had could wield as something other than a storybook in a polluted, frozen season back East, lighted by filthy eastern fires that flicker on greasy eastern walls.

A man needed strength, he needed resolve, and he needed the very sort of determination one requires to spurn something so pervasive as liquor, so do not criticize my choice of audience! It was the most responsible one I could have picked! I submit that no one understands that all his actions have consequences better than a reformed drunk.

[He makes this point almost calmly, even forcing a smile, but then resumes with greater violence than we've seen from him, though it is violence of a panicked, defensive persuasion.]

Do you think my forebear, Thomas Hastings, caroused his way across the Atlantic in 1634? Do you? Do you suppose he went the way of the Mayflower and the Arabella that came before with drunken abandon? Do you think there was even a goddamn saloon in 17-century Watertown, Massachusetts?

No! God damn you, there wasn't!

And God will damn all who mock the purpose and drive of crossing to the Other Side of the Frontier, so do not so much as insinuate that He ever needed Lansford Warren Hastings's help in so doing.

[He breathes shakily.]

I wrote a book. I simply wrote a book: do not accuse me—a mere author—of daring to play God.

Some cede responsibility to liquor; some cede it to God; a few more imaginative souls ceded it entirely—and I mean entirely—to my guide.

That, Dear Reader, is what I call Yankee ingenuity!

[He lifts his hand in an extremely bitter toast and drinks wordlessly. The fiddler takes it in.]

[Silence. Eventually, he steadies himself.]

By the spring of 1845, sales were brisk, and it was time that I headed West once more. We were a few weeks shy of the fall harvest when I had accumulated the names of some 20 men who agreed to join me at once to venture overland on horseback to California.