find their fortunes in a strange land. There was nothing dull about the trail-blazers of early Oregon. The fertile imaginations and buoyant personalities of these “rovers-by-instinct” color all of their writings and make of them fascinating and even thrilling reading.
Although the trappers came west for commercial purposes, there is less evidence than would be expected of this in their narratives. They are more deeply concerned with the novel ways of the Red Man, with the nobility of Mount Hood “covered in eternal snow,” and with the grandeur of the Willamette Valley which reminded one of them of “Byron’s description of Italy.” This one was James Clyman, who apparently had the classics for his models. He makes frequent and off-hand reference to Milton, to the Bible, and even to Shakespeare. Whatever Clyman’s Diary lacks in form it more than supplies in imaginative appreciation and intensity of feeling.
The fur-traders as a group had little formal education, and were thus seriously hampered when trying to describe the sights they saw, and the hardships they met. But such a handicap did not deter them. At the end of a day spent in fording streams, breaking through dense underbrush, hunting food, and often-times fighting with the Indians, they still had the strength and will to sit down by the lonely campfire, and by means of its flickering light write down their experiences in vivid and glowing terms. There is romance and perhaps a little pathos in the picture of a rough and work-hardened old trapper struggling to find words to express what he felt when he first saw the mighty waters and forests and “heaven-piercing
