Setting Out
From The Frontier Of The Old West In The Spring As Soon As The Grass
Would Support Their Cattle, They Pushed On Up The Platte, Making Haste
Slowly, However, That They Might Not Be Caught In The Storms Of Winter
Ere They Reached The Promised Land.
They crossed the Rocky Mountains
to Fort Hall; thence followed down the Snake River for three or four
hundred
Miles, their cattle limping and failing on the rough lava
plains; swimming the streams too deep to be forded, making boats out
of wagon-boxes for the women and children and goods, or where trees
could be had, lashing together logs for rafts. Thence, crossing the
Blue Mountains and the plains of the Columbia, they followed the river
to the Dalles. Here winter would be upon them, and before a wagon
road was built across the Cascade Mountains the toil-worn emigrants
would be compelled to leave their cattle and wagons until the
following summer, and, in the mean time, with the assistance of the
Hudson's Bay Company, make their way to the Willamette Valley on the
river with rafts and boats.
How strange and remote these trying times have already become! They
are now dim as if a thousand years had passed over them. Steamships
and locomotives with magical influence have well-nigh abolished the
old distances and dangers, and brought forward the New West into near
and familiar companionship with the rest of the world.
Purely wild for unnumbered centuries, a paradise of oily, salmon-fed
Indians, Oregon is now roughly settled in part and surveyed, its
rivers and mountain ranges, lakes, valleys, and plains have been
traced and mapped in a general way, civilization is beginning to take
root, towns are springing up and flourishing vigorously like a crop
adapted to the soil, and the whole kindly wilderness lies invitingly
near with all its wealth open and ripe for use.
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