cians and financiers. At once the hero and the villain of the early Oregon piece, the Cascade Range still imposes a dozen divergent viewpoints upon the modern State; and it is therefore unlikely, if not impossible, that there be any such thing as a typical Oregonian.
The history of the State has been an essay in dramatic counterpoint that did not in itself make for homogeneity. The epochal journey of Lewis and Clark into the wild country still stands as a monumental achievement. The explorers live as shining examples of men who had a difficult job to do, and who did it with resounding thoroughness. But, while they pried open the dark doorway to the unknown West, the reports that they brought back of the Oregon Country's teeming animal life opened the territory also to some precious scoundrels.
The fur traders who came after Lewis and Clark were as realistic in their approach to the country as were Cortez to Mexico and Pizzaro to Peru. They plagued the Indians with whiskey and social diseases, salted the very beaver skins with corruption, and yearned to be quit of the savage land as quickly as possible. The missionaries who followed were, in the main, devout if somewhat severe men who strove mightily to invest the natives in spirituality and trousers; but even among these a few learned to sing upon both sides of the Jordan, and to deal more briskly in real estate than in salvation. While the great overland migration to Oregon has been sanctified by tradition it seems foolish to presume that the covered wagons carried nothing but animated virtues into Oregon.
The great migration, as a matter of fact, contained every sort of human ingredient. Here came craftsmen from the Atlantic seaboard cities, uprooted by cheap labor from troubled Europe, journeying across the yellow Missouri, the great deserts and the towering mountains. So, also, came eastern farmers whose soil had worn thin from the sowings and reapings of two hundred years, doctors who lacked patients, lawyers who lacked clients. They came because they thought that they might better themselves and their families. No sane person would question their courage, or the hardihood of those who survived; but it is barely possible that they were not all either sunbonneted madonnas, or paragons of manhood jouncing westward with banjos on their knees.
The better of those who came may have lived longer. They certainly toiled harder, and they left the stamp of their fierce industry upon everything they touched. Had they been given time, had immigration ceased with them, they might have fused and welded the traits of a dozen eastern localities and produced something—a mode of speech, a
