Well, maybe you know what a cactus is. It's a, you know, the desert plant from Cowboy movies, and it has needles which stick and hurt and it's green, but yeah.
To be one of a crowd wandering around in search of a place to settle down, with your existence distilled down to a handful of mementoes and a cactus, is profoundly depressing.
They would eventually settle down and build the greatest city in the world where the location would be determined wherever they saw an eagle eating a snake in its beak while perched atop a cactus.