ountry was overleaped and ignored.

Our national horizon extended immeasurably along that dusty way. In the
use of the Oregon Trail we first began to be great. The chief figure
of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired,
fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but the gaunt and sadfaced
woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where
he might lead, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had
crossed the Appalachians and the Missouri long before. That was America,
my brethren! There was the seed of America's wealth. There was the great
romance of all America--the woman in the sunbonnet; and not, after all,
the hero with the rifle across his saddle horn. Who has written her
story? Who has painted her picture?

They were large days, those of the great Oregon Trail, not always
pleasingly dramatic, but oftentimes tragic and terrible. We speak of
the Oregon Trail, but it means little to us today; nor will any mere
generalities ever make it mean much to us. But what did it mean to the
men and women of that day? What and who were those men and women?
What did it mean to take the Overland Trail in the great adventure of
abandoning forever the known and the safe and setting out for Oregon
or California at a time when everything in the far West was new and
unknown? How did those good folk travel? Why and whither did they
travel?

There is a book done by C. F. McGlashan, a resident of Truckee,
California, known as "The History of the Donner Party," holding a great
deal of actual history. McGlashan, living close to Donner Lake, wrote
in 1879, describing scenes with which he was perfectly familiar, and
recounting facts which he had from direct association with participants
in the ill-fated Donner Party. He chronicles events which happened in
1846--a date before the discovery of gold in California. The Donner
Party was one of the typical American caravans of homeseekers who
started for the Pacific Slope with no other purpose than that of
founding homes there, and with no expectation of sudden wealth to be
gained in the mines. I desire therefore to quote largely from the
pages of this book, believing that, in this fashion, we shall come upon
history of a fundamental sort, which shall make us acquainted with the
men and women of that day, with the purposes and the ambitions which
animated them, and with the hardships which they encountered.

"The States along the Missi