was wild, ere
a single road or bridge was built, undaunted by the trackless
thousand-mile distances and scalping, cattle-stealing Indians, long
trains of covered wagons began to crawl wearily westward, crossing how
many plains, rivers, ridges, and mountains, fighting the painted savages
and weariness and famine. 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.

In sailing along the Oregon coast one sees but few more signs of human
occupation than did Juan de Fuca three centuries ago. The shore bluffs
rise abruptly from the waves, forming a wall apparently unbroken, though
many short rivers from the coast range of mountains and two from the
interior hav