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each other out of the streams." "Money? Why, man alive, money grows out there." "Yes, and feather-beds grow on the bushes."
With gay hearts they started as on a summer holiday, some with only the clothes they wore and a blanket slung over the shoulder. The spring was late. It rained and rained, and the camps were long and frequent along the swollen Platte. Provisions melted away.
"Courage," they said to one another. "Did not our ancestors come in six weeks' journeys from the seaboard to Ohio, to Kentucky, to Missouri? Oregon is but another journey a little farther west."
But it stretched away and away, six months and more, and still the road ran on. No one supposed that Oregon was so far, no one realized that there were no hospices through all that fearful stretch of travel. Buffalo eluded the immigrant trail. Provisions gave out. Clothing wore out. Some were sick. Infants were born on the way. Without a mentor to bid them " travel, travel, travel," winter came down upon them unprepared, and from Burnt River to the Dalles the caravan became a panorama of destitution.
Pioneer printers, pioneer lumber-kings, pioneer merchants and manufacturers, poor enough then, barefooted broke the path over the Blue Mountains through the deep, untrodden snow. Oregon is dotted with their granite pillars; for one of them California has reared a statue-crowned shaft on the spot where four years later he found the gold of Eldorado. Dr. Whitman taught his Indians to go far out and build their bonfires on the hills to guide them in. They "packed "provisions to the Grande Ronde, and yet the end of October came with five hundred people still beyond the
