OREGON
The spell and the light of each path we pursue--
If woman be there, there is happiness too.
--Moore.
Twenty miles a day, week in and week out, we edged westward up the
Platte, in heat and dust part of the time, often plagued at night by
clouds of mosquitoes. Our men endured the penalties of the journey
without comment. I do not recall that I ever heard even the weakest
woman complain. Thus at last we reached the South Pass of the Rockies,
not yet half done our journey, and entered upon that portion of the
trail west of the Rockies, which had still two mountain ranges to cross,
and which was even more apt to be infested by the hostile Indians. Even
when we reached the ragged trading post, Fort Hall, we had still more
than six hundred miles to go.
By this time our forces had wasted as though under assault of arms. Far
back on the trail, many had been forced to leave prized belongings,
relics, heirlooms, implements, machinery, all conveniences. The finest
of mahogany blistered in the sun, abandoned and unheeded. Our trail
might have been followed by discarded implements of agriculture, and by
whitened bones as well. Our footsore teams, gaunt and weakened, began to
faint and fall. Horses and oxen died in the harness or under the yoke,
and were perforce abandoned where they fell. Each pound of superfluous
weight was cast away as our motive power thus lessened. Wagons were
abandoned, goods were packed on horses, oxen and cows. We put cows into
the yoke now, and used women instead of men on the drivers' seats, and
boys who started riding finished afoot. Our herds were sadly lessened by
theft of the Indians, by death, by strayings which our guards had not
time to follow up. If a wagon lagged it was sawed shorter to lessen its
weight Sometimes the hind wheels were abandoned, and the reduced
personal belongings were packed on the cart thus made, which
nevertheless traveled on, painfully, slowly, yet always going ahead. In
the deserts beyond Fort Hall, wagons disintegrated by the heat. Wheels
would fall apart, couplings break under the straining teams. Still more
here was the trail lined with boxes, vehicles, furniture, all the
flotsam and jetsam of the long, long Oregon Trail.
The grass was burned to its roots, the streams were reduced to ribbons,
the mirages of the desert mocked us desperately. Rain came seldom now,
and the sage-brush of the desert was white with bitter dust, which in
vast clouds rose sometimes in the wind to make our journey the harder.
In autumn, as we approached the second range of mountains, we could see
the taller peaks whitened with snow. Our leaders looked anxiously ahead,
dreading the storms which must ere long overtake us. Still, gaunt now
and haggard, weakened in body but not in soul, we pressed on across.
That was the way to Oregon.
Gaunt and brown and savage, hungry and grim, ragged, hatless, shoeless,
our cavalcade closed up and came on, and so at last came through. Ere
autumn had yellowed all the foliage back east in gentler climes, we
crossed the shoulders of the Blue Mountains and came into the Valley of
the Walla Walla; and so passed thence down the Columbia to the Valley of
the Willamette, three hundred miles yet farther, where there were then
some slight centers of our civilization which had gone forward the year
before.
Here were some few Americans. At Champoeg, at the little American
missions, at Oregon City, and other scattered points, we met them, we
hailed and were hailed by them. They were Americans. Women and plows
were with them. There were churches and schools already started, and a
beginning had been made in government. Faces and hands and ways and
customs and laws of our own people greeted us. Yes. It was America.
Messengers spread abroad the news of the arrival of our wagon train.
Messengers, too, came down from the Hudson Bay posts to scan our
equipment and estimate our numbers. There was no word obtainable from
these of any Canadian column of occupation to the northward which had
crossed at the head of the Peace River or the Saskatchewan, or which lay
ready at the head waters of the Fraser or the Columbia to come down to
the lower settlements for the purpose of bringing to an issue, or making
more difficult, this question of the joint occupancy of Oregon. As a
matter of fact, ultimately we won that transcontinental race so
decidedly that there never was admitted to have been a second.
As for our people, they knew how neither to hesitate nor to dread. They
unhooked their oxen from the wagons and put them to the plows. The fruit
trees, which had crossed three ranges of mountains and two thousand
miles of unsettled country, now found new rooting. Streams which had
borne no fruit save that of the beaver traps now were made to give
tribute to little fields and gardens, or asked to transport wheat
instead of furs. The forests which had blocked our way were now made
into roofs and walls and fences. Whatever the future might bring, those
who had come so far and dared so much feared that future no more than
they had feared the troubles which in detail they had overcome in their
vast pilgrimage.
So we took Oregon by the only law of right. Our broken and weakened
cavalcade asked renewal from the soil itself. We ruffled no drum,
fluttered no flag, to take possession of the land. But the canvas covers
of our wagons gave way to permanent roofs. Where we had known a hundred
camp-fires, now we lighted the fires of many hundred homes.