The Old Overland Trail from the Missouri River to the Willamette is a
distance of nearly two thousand miles. Before Jason Lee and Marcus
Whitman sanctioned its use for the migrating myriads of Americans
seeking the shores of the sunset sea, trappers and adventurers, good
and bad, had mapped out a general route over the wind-whipped passes,
where the storm stands sentinel and guards the granite ways among the
rough Rocky Mountains. They had followed the falls-filled Snake and
the calmer Columbia, which plow for a thousand miles or more among
basaltic bastions buttressing the mountain sides, or through the lava
lands where cavernous chasms yawn and abysmal depths echo back the
sullen roar of the raging rapids.
In the early forties of the nineteenth century restless spirits
from Missouri and eastward began to filter through the fingertips
of the beckoning mountains of the West and locate in the land where
storms seldom come and where the extremes of heat and cold are
unknown--Willamette Valley, Oregon.
In these early days, a farmer, whom we shall name Johnson, with wife
and son, hoping to better conditions and prolong life, thus sought the
goal toward the setting sun. Starting when the sturdy spring was
enlivening all nature, they left the malarial marshes of the
Mississippi Valley, where quinine and whisky for "fevernagur" were to
be had at every crossroads store, and in a couple of weeks found
themselves west of the muddy Missouri, where the herds of humped bison
grazed as yet unafraid among the rolling, well-wooded hills of eastern
Kansas.
Barring a few common hindrances, they went well and reached the higher
and hotter plains in midsummer; they were out of the sight of hills
and trees--just one weary, eternal, unchangeable vista day after day.
Mrs. Johnson had not been well, and after a few weeks that promised
more for the future than they fulfilled, she began gradually to lose
strength.
But she was made of the uncomplaining material pioneers are wrought
of, the ones who so lived, loved, and labored that the hard-earned
sweets of civilization grew to highest perfection about their graves,
and proved the most enduring monument to their memory. She never
murmured other than to ask occasionally: "Father, how much farther?
Isn't it a wonderfully long way to Oregon?"
"Just over that next range of hills, I think, from what the trappers
told me," was the reply, after they had come to the toes of the
foothills that terminate the long-lying limbs of the giant Rockies.
But he did not know the stealth of the mountains nor the fantastic
pranks the cañony ranges can play upon the stranger. A snowy-haired
peak, brother to Father Time, wearing a fringe of evergreens for his
neckruff, would play hide-and-seek with them for days, dodging behind
this eminence and hiding away back of that hill, only to reappear
apparently as far off as ever, and sometimes in a different direction
from where he last seemed to be.