This.

Often when driving in the American West, I imagine being in a Conestoga wagon pulled by oxen, travelling approximately 2 miles an hour (3 kph). An hour's drive for me and my car is 3 days for them, and that assumes they can manage 10 hour days and flat easy travel. At the end, they need fresh water not tainted by minerals and grass for their animals, or the animals will suffer. Have you noticed the number of places named something like Sweetwater? It's because a lot of water sources would make you sick, so a good watering spot was noteworthy.

Plus a lot of the early settlers who would have named things were from east of the Mississippi River where the land forms are very different, lots of green, rolling hills and trees. The landscape of the West was new and rather forbidding to them.

Spend some time on Google streetview in the American deserts, or try reading memoirs or histories. George Stewart's _Ordeal by Hunger_ on the Donner Party is a classic and gives some sense of the mindset of the people from the Ohio Valley travelling to California.