From Youth to Age as an American. 163 the siinniiit— hauling- out rails from Albany and putting them in place across the summit, so as to claim their pass. The line was constructed to a point five miles east of Detroit and a summer resort hotel erected and named Idana, and the right of way cut out and graded twelve miles further, with bridge timbers and ties in great numbers ready for distribution. From the summit westward nearly twenty miles of right of way was lined with workmen, many of whom had located claims expecting to make their homes there when the line was completed. The writer believes that $1,000.00 more would have taken a wagon road from plain to plain, and $1,000,000.00 more, the railroad. The working party who constructed the Marion and Wasco stock and wagon road, now spoken of as the Minto Trail, were as a party just such men as I had seen as pioneer settlers on and around Brady's Bend of the Alle- gany River in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, in 1841 — just such as were leaving the Platte Purchase in Missouri in 1844 for Oregon and Texas. We started in early June, a com- pany of eighteen workers, and our purveyor by contract hired a strong young woman, whose husband was one of the work- ers, to cook for us. She had a baby to care for, and wisely re- signed at the end of the first month, and was succeeded by two sisters, fifteen and seventeen years of age, whose father was one of the foremost men of my party, and whose mother was the only frontiersman's wife who could take up any line of "the Hoosieroon." Prom her teaching, I presume, our cooks could on the slightest hint break out in lively song, and often dissipated gathering clouds of depression by making our campfire a social center and keeping our party as a whole much like a large family party. Indeed, they made myself the only exception, as representing the moneyed portion of the corporation at Salem, and before we reached the summit had composed a song in compliment to me when we should reach the summit. It so happened their poet got an oppor- tunity to betray the plan, and having a poet's weakness he recited his composition, and I told him I should try hard to have one in reply. The "Road-Makers," or "Boys of Santi-
