The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 1, No. 4, December, 1900

The early Oregon pioneers not only gained the first secure foothold for the American people on the Pacific Coast, but their movement opened the way to American occupation and in itself counted as an occupation of that realm for American civilization. They moved across the continent at an auspicious time, and so were able to influence, if not to shape, the course of great events touching the widening of the American dominion on the Pacific. It was all done so quietly, so efficiently, at so comparatively small cost and without any shock of harrowing disaster, that the world has yet to connect the momentous results with a cause seemingly so inadequate.

As the American people come to realize that their distinctively national achievement so far, next to that of maintaining a national integrity, has been that of preempting and subduing an adequate dominion and home for a civilization they will revere the services of those who made the transcontinental migrations in the thirties, forties and fifties. The glory that belongs to the participants in those migrations is the peculiar birthright of the patriotic Oregonian. The passage from the Atlantic slope to the Pacific of these first American households bearing the best embers of western civilization must ever stand as a momentous event in the annals of time.

For twenty-eight years, now, surviving participants in this world event have annually assembled to recount the incidents of their coming to Oregon, to live over that trying but hallowed time, to rekindle old flames of friendship and form new ties on the basis of their common experiences. At these meetings of the Oregon pioneers there was always an “occasional address” in which the reminiscences of the immigration of some particular year were given. As the journal of the association puts it, the object of the association “should be to collect reminiscences relating to pioneers and the early history of the territory; to promote social intercourse, and cultivate the life-enduring friendships that in many instances had been formed while making the long, perilous journey of the wide, wild plains, which separated the western boundary of civilization thirty years ago from the land which they had resolved to reclaim.” The biographical notices contained in the transactions of their association all mark this coming to Oregon as a dividing event in the lives of their subjects. That generation of Oregonians suffered something like a transfiguration through this movement, which also widened the nation’s outlook—in making it face a greater sea. These transforming influences wrought their effects during the summer season that each successive immigration spent on the Oregon trail, while journeying in canvas-topped oxen-drawn wagons from the banks of the Missouri to those of the Willamette. The greatest epochal expansion of the nation was insured through these migrations at the same time that the participants were translating their lives to a new sphere.

1.—Near the site of Fort Kearney on the Platte. (Part of pontoon bridge is used as road fence.) ]

For engaging and vivid detail of experiences in this movement, recourse must be had to the transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, and to journals kept on the way across the plains. These will ever have an interest for the heart of man as they show life under heroic impulse and in trying conditions long sustained. The whole movement Oregonward has an epic unity, and when its significance has become fully manifest will challenge the powers of the national poet.

But the movement has not yet, even in its outward aspects, been viewed as a whole. To mark off its limits in time, in routes taken, in numbers and population elements involved; to note the main motives, the forms of characteristic experiences; in a word to make, as it were, a composite view with relation to national history as a background,—would seem to be the first step for realizing the due appreciation of the significance of the work of the Oregon pioneers. A sketch of the outlines of the movement in its more salient features, then, is what is attempted here, with the hope that such setting forth of the movement as a whole, with outlines more or less closely defined, will lead to its being brought fully into relation with the general course of events of American history. Until the story of the Oregon movement is thus set forth, the historians of our national life cannot weave it into its proper conspicuous relations in their narratives. It has no doubt been largely due to this lack if the story of this pioneer achievement in available form that a somewhat undue estimate of Doctor Whitman’s services and the acceptance of mythical accretions to them have come about. The Whitman story was early available and was made to do service in accounting for a larger outcome than facts warranted.

The Oregon migrations effected at one sweep a two thousand mile extension of the Aryan movement westward in the occupation of the north temperate zone—“a far-flung” outpost of occupation and settlement. To appreciate the boldness, intrepidity and consummate effectiveness of such pioneering we have but to note that no previous extension had compassed one-fourth this distance. Nor were the conditions in this instance easy. One continuous stretch of Indian country infested with most formidable predatory tribes had to be passed through. Conditions approximating those of a desert had to be faced during a large part of the migration. There were swift rivers to ford or ferry, and three mountain ranges to scale. Only one form of the usual difficulties of pioneer road-making did not appear. There were no extensive forests to penetrate except on the ridges of the Blue and the Cascade Mountains.

The settlements of the blue grass region of Kentucky, and the Nashville district, in Western Tennessee, were, when first made, the most isolated from the main body of the American people. Yet, these had less than a four-hundred mile stretch between them and the settled region of the Atlantic slope. No other outward movement of Aryan people ever covered anything like the distance made by the Oregon pioneers on the Oregon trail. Measured by the sea voyage, the Oregon settlements were a leap of seventeen thousand miles.