wheel and
the hand loom, the quaint old cobbler's bench with its handmade lasts
and shoe pegs, the heavy iron mush pot on the crane in the chimney
corner,--all have gone. The men and women of sixty years or more ago are
passing, too. All are laid aside for what is new in the drama of life.
While these old-time ways and scenes and actors have had their day, yet
the experiences and the lessons they taught are not lost to the world.

The difference between a civilized and an untutored people lies in the
application of experiences. The civilized man builds upon the
foundations of the past, with hope and ambition for the future. The
savage has neither past nor aspiration for the future. To keep the flame
of patriotism alive, we must keep the memory of the past vividly before
us.

It was with these thoughts in mind that the expedition to mark the old
Oregon Trail was undertaken. There was this further thought, that on
this trail heroic men and women had fought a veritable battle--a battle
that wrested half a continent from the native race and from another
mighty nation contending for mastery in unknown regions of the West. To
mark the field of that battle for future generations was a duty waiting
for some one; I determined to be the one to fulfill it.

The journey back over the old Oregon Trail by ox team was made during my
seventy-seventh year. On January 29, 1906, I left my home in Puyallup,
Washington, and on November 29, 1907, just twenty-two months later to
the day, I reached Washington, our national capital, with my cattle and
my old prairie schooner. Not all of this time was spent in travel, of
course; a good deal of it was taken up in furthering the purpose of the
trip by arranging for the erection and dedication of monuments to mark
the Trail.

To accomplish the purpose of marking the trail would have been enough to
make the journey worth while to me, besides all the interest of
freshening my recollections of old times and reviving old memories.
There is not space in this book to dwell on all the contrasts that came
to my mind constantly,--of the uncleared forests with the farms and
orchards of today, of the unbroken prairie lands with the ranches and
farms and cities that now border the old trail from the Rockies to the
Mississippi. There is nothing like an ox-team journey, I maintain, to
make a person realize this country, realize its size, the number of its
people, and the variety of conditions in which they