Читать книгу The Overland Trail - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 3

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One cannot better describe that great racial Highway of Humanity, that conquest of civilization over savagery, beginning its movement ever westward in the days of Abraham, going up the Euphrates from Ur on the Persian Gulf 2,000 B.C., and ending in our own days on the shores of the Pacific over the Pioneer Oregon Trail, than in the Memorial address given by Dr. Howard R. Driggs on the death of Ezra Meeker, one of the last of the Overlanders:

“It touches closely every part of our country, North, South, East and West. Every state in the Union has some heroic son or daughter who has played a valiant part in the trail-blazing, home-building story of the Far West.

“What is the West? It is merely the transplanted East. It is the blended North and South. We sometimes hear the song, ‘Out Where the West Begins.’ Frankly, I do not know where the West begins, but I do know where it began. It began along the shores of the stormy Atlantic. Our American pioneers were descendants of those who planted our thirteen American colonies and who afterward fought to establish this nation dedicated to freedom. It was the descendants of these stalwart defenders of liberty who carried America Westward. They followed the Indian trails through the passes of the Alleghenies along the national highways to the Mississippi; thence they wended their way over prairies and plains and mountains and deserts to the shores of the Pacific, there to plant our great Empire States beyond the Rockies. It is not commonly known how great this migration was. We get a mere suggestion of it when we learn from conservative estimates that fully three hundred and fifty thousand Americans took these trails during the days of the covered wagon—from 1836, when Marcus Whitman and his wife first made their way to Oregon, to 1869, when the Golden Spike linking the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific was driven at Promontory Point, at the north end of the great Salt Lake in Utah.

“We are brought a little closer to the tragic cost of it all when we realize that fully twenty thousand lost their lives in the effort to reach the Golden West. You can appreciate that I have a tender interest in the story when I tell you that somewhere among the velvety hills of old Iowa four of my great-grandparents lie in unmarked graves. They had no means of marking the graves of the dead in those prairie stretches. They might have put at the mound of the loved one laid away the skull of a buffalo, the end gate of a wagon or some other temporary marker, but mainly what they did was to scatter the ashes of their camp fires over these resting places to keep the bodies of their dear ones from being dug up by the wolves.

“Very few graves out of all the twenty thousand, so far as we know, are surely marked. One of these is the grave of the pioneer mother near Scott’s Bluffs, Nebraska. When Rebecca Winters passed away, one of the company had the happy forethought to pick up an old wagon tire that lay along the trail. Bending it into an oval he set the tire within the grave. On the top of the tire was chiseled the mother’s name and age. For more than three-score years it stood over the mound. Finally a party of surveyors laying out a railroad along the old North Platte, by mere chance happened to run their line right over the mother’s grave. As they read the inscription on the old wagon tire, they were touched by the love of a mother’s heart. They telegraphed into Salt Lake City, because it was on the old Salt Lake branch of the Oregon Trail, and relatives of the pioneer mother wired back who she was. Then the railroad builders protected the grave, erecting a neat, substantial fence about it. A monument, inscribed briefly with the story, was sent from Utah and set beside the old wagon tire, which still arches above the mound.

“Some years ago, I was in the Museum in Portland, Oregon, listening to George Himes, Secretary of the Oregon Historical Association, tell the story of the coming of the pioneers into the then Territory of Washington. I shall never forget the vivid recital of an experience he had as a boy of ten with the trail blazers into the far Northwest when they had to kill three of their oxen to use their hides to splice two ropes to let their twenty-nine wagons down a cliff that barred their way. Mr. Himes showed me during this visit one of the corners of the Museum in which he had relics that had come from every state east of the Mississippi River. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘is a clock that used to tick time in Vermont; here is a Franklin stove with which they used to warm themselves in Pennsylvania; here is a cradle in which they rocked the baby across the plains from Indiana and here is a scythe with which they mowed blue grass in Kentucky.’ ‘Yes, Mr. Himes,’ said I, ‘these people came bearing not only their scythes, and their stoves, their clocks and their cradles; they came carrying America across our continent; they came sprinkling the names of American towns and cities dear to their hearts upon the map of every state that they crossed; they came planting their school houses and churches; they came telling their children of the making of America; they came with American ideals throbbing in their hearts. They came, if you please, stretching the warp of our national life from one end of our country to the other. They stretched it stout and taut and true.’

“The vital question with you and me and with every American now is, ‘Will the warp hold?’ It will, provided we can keep alive the sacred stories of the pioneer builders of this nation in the hearts of American boys and girls. If we would save our country we must see to it that we save this invaluable heritage. An incident comes to my mind which would serve to make concrete the thought I would impress. It chances that recently I was giving an address in a high school in the Bronx, New York City, on America’s Greatest Trail. At the close of this address there came to me a young man, whose name was so foreign that I could not pronounce it, and he said with tears in his voice, ‘Mr. Driggs, if we could have our history taught to us like that, we would feel like saluting the flag. They tell us to salute the flag. We don’t know what they are talking about.’ ”

Could Americans grasp what an enormous achievement that was—accomplishing in a hundred years what neither Europe nor Asia had achieved in four thousand years—the Oregon Trail would be marked as one of the most famous in history. It would be regarded from end to end as the fulfilment of that Divine Prophecy “when His Dominions shall extend from the rivers to the ends of the earth.” It would be beautified, revered, consecrated as a Great National Highway. It would be visited and traversed by every traveler in the land. And it was not built by slave labor as were older highways in ancient lands. It was cut across the sand-blown desert, hewn through the solid rocks of the mountain passes, sculptured against the walls of river canyons by wagon rims of the penniless pioneer going West, ever West; of his Divine urge following the fantom hopes of his own heart to a Newer, Better, Promised Land.

Great epochs in history like mountain peaks in the receding sun lengthen their shadows as they recede. Tardily, very tardily, the Overland Trail is coming into its own. Its full history will never be told; it is lost in the dumb, inarticulate heroism of the dead; for pioneers did not ride “cock-horse on parade” like ancient conquerors. They marched on and died in silence as they marched, and the next band of marchers passed on; but enough of its heroism can be told to stir every heart. Enough of its dauntless adventuring can be recorded to keep its epic achievement fragrant and marvelous in memory. That is all attempted here—just enough to recall the shadowy figures of a Past that created the Present—ghost figures they may be but ghost figures that can never be degraded by cynic sneer; for these ghosts claimed no heroism. They just did their stint of work in life’s span and laid them down to sleep with good work well done.

A. C. L.