What would make you decide to leave your home, your neighborhood, your state – everything familiar – knowing you would never return? Or to be an immigrant, someone who comes from one country to live in another?
What would make you decide to travel thousands of miles on land or sea to an unknown place? No restaurants along the way. No motels. No rest stops. Only the food and clothes you could fit into a wagon or carry onto a ship. What would make you do it?
What would have made the pioneers of the early 19th century decide to head for California? Why did they travel thousands of miles by ship or make the difficult overland journey with little information and few hard facts about their unknown destination? Some were pushed to make the journey by circumstances at home. Some were pulled by the lure of California and other destinations in the West.
