CHAPTER 6
The Pioneers Have Much to Say
Fields are green and cities rise
Where we camped and fought and journeyed
With the sunset in our eyes.
The Oregon pioneers were not taciturn. They were not even diffident about writing down their experiences. The literature left by them is accordingly vast. For a hundred years it has been printed, and it is still being printed in great quantities in newspaper columns, in the quarterlies of historical societies, and as pamphlets and books. Their records are of two kinds—what they wrote in current or immediate reaction to their experiences and what they wrote reminiscently. The former consisted of accounts sent back to the home papers, letters to friends and relatives, journals and diaries. The latter is in the form of first-hand chronicles, sometimes short and sometimes long enough for a book, sometimes dependent almost wholly upon memory and sometimes supported by contemporary records of various sorts; and in the form also of interviews and ghost writing.
Their literary energy is surprising when one considers that they were not writing men and the accompanying circumstances that made penciled composition so difficult. On the part of the women there was often apparent a tragic intensity to their urge for self-expression. Under uncongenial, deterring conditions, while the fatigues of the day had been enough to numb the body, they nevertheless felt a mysterious motivation, a strange unsatisfied stimulus of the spirit, that
