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 ri