ad always been altering the man who came to it;
and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of the frontier,
nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. A new people now was in
process of formation--a people born of a new environment. America and
the American were conceiving. There was soon to be born, soon swiftly to
grow, a new and lasting type of man. Man changes an environment only by
bringing into it new or better transportation. Environment changes man.
Here in the midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways
of the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our
land.

The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the wagon-trains
went out hundreds strong, were not the same as the scattering cavalcade
of the fur hunters, not the same as the ox-trains and mule-trains of the
Santa Fe traffic. The men who wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon
Trail were neither trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men--the
first real emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond
the Rockies.

The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur trade.
Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in the thirties.
The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it only after crossing the
Rockies. But, before gold in California was dreamed of, there had come
back to the States reports of lands rich in resources other than gold,
lying in the far Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before
the Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men
with their families, men with their household goods, were steadily
passing out for the far-off and unknown country of Oregon.

The Oregon Trail was the pathway for Fremont in 1842, perhaps the most
overvalued explorer of all the West; albeit this comment may to some
seem harsh. Kit Carson and Bill Williams led Fremont across the Rockies
almost by the hand. Carson and Williams themselves had been taken across
by the Indian tribes. But Fremont could write; and the story which he
set down of his first expedition inflamed the zeal of all. Men began
to head out for that far-away country beyond the Rockies. Not a few
scattered bands, but very many, passed up the valley of the Platte.
There began a tremendous trek of thousands of men who wanted homes
somewhere out beyond the frontier. And that was more than ten years
before the Civil War. The cow trade was not dreamed of; the coming cow
c