Before Franklin, as before many other young men suddenly grown old, there lay the necessity of earning a livelihood, of choosing an occupation.  The paternal arm of the Government, which had guided and controlled so long, was now withdrawn.  The young man must think for himself.  He must choose his future, and work out his way therein alone and unsupported.  The necessity of this choice, and the grave responsibility assumed in choosing, confronted and oppressed Edward Franklin as they did many another young man, whose life employment had not been naturally determined by family or business associations.  He stood looking out over the way of life.  There came to his soul that indefinite melancholy known by the young man not yet acquainted with the mysteries of life.  Franklin had been taken away at the threshold of young manhood and crowded into a rude curriculum, which taught him reserve as well as self-confidence, but which robbed him of part of the natural expansion in experience which is the ordinary lot of youth.  He had seen large things, and had become intolerant of the small.  He wished to achieve life, success, and happiness at one assault, and rebelled at learning how stubborn a resistance there lies in that perpetual silent line of earth’s innumerable welded obstacles.  He grieved, but knew not why he grieved.  He yearned, but named no cause.

To this young man, ardent, energetic, malcontent, there appeared the vision of wide regions of rude, active life, offering full outlet for all the bodily vigour of a man, and appealing not less powerfully to his imagination.  This West—­no man had come back from it who was not eager to return to it again!  For the weak and slothful it might do to remain in the older communities, to reap in the long-tilled fields, but for the strong, for the unattached, for the enterprising, this unknown, unexplored, uncertain country offered a scene whose possibilities made irresistible appeal.  For two years Franklin did the best he could at reading law in a country office.  Every time he looked out of the window he saw a white-topped wagon moving West.  Men came back and told him of this West.  Men wrote letters from the West to friends who remained in the East.  Presently these friends also, seized upon by some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their affairs and departed for the West.  Franklin looked about him at the squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around him.  He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun.  It seemed to him that somewhere out in the vast land beyond the Missouri there beckoned to him a mighty hand, the index finger of some mighty force, imperative, forbidding pause.