George Rogers Clark to tell
him he understood the English had subscribed a very large sum of
money for exploration of the country west of the Mississippi, and as
far as California. He even expressed himself as being desirous of
forming a party of Americans to make the trip.

Twenty years later, under the direction of _President_ Thomas
Jefferson, General Clark was made a member of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition, which went up the "great river" and ultimately crossed
through Montana and Idaho to the Columbia (Oregan?) and the "salt
sea."

Zebulon Pike was turned back by the imperious Rocky Mountains in 1806.
A few years later Captain Bonneville braved the plains, the plateaus,
the mountain passes, and the deserts, and saw the Columbia. Then
continuous migrations finally fixed the overland highway known from
ocean to ocean as the Oregon Trail.

The Mormons followed this national road when they trekked to the
valley of Salt Lake in 1847--a dolorous path to many.

Because the Oregon Trail was nature's way, man and commerce made it
their way. Road sites are not like city sites--made to order; they are
discovered. For that reason the pioneer railway transcontinental also
followed this trail. The Union Pacific marks with iron what so many of
the emigrants marked with their tears and their graves. From the mouth
of the Platte to the heart of the Rocky Mountains and beyond is a
continuous cemetery of nameless tombs.

The next few pages will give some sketches of fact depicting scenes of
sunlight and shadow that fell on this highway in days not so very long
agone.

THE LONG TRAIL

Those mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like pierce the desert airs,
When nearer seen and better known
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
--_Longfellow_.

THE LONG TRAIL

The Old Overland Trail from the Missouri River to the Willamette is a
distance of nearly two thousand miles. Before Jason Lee and Marcus
Whitman sanctioned its use for the migrating myriads of Americans
seeking the shores of the sunset sea, trappers and adventurers, good
and bad, had mapped out a general route over the wind-whipped passes,
where the storm stands sentinel and guards the granite ways among the
rough Rocky Mountains. They had followed the falls-filled Snake and
the calmer Columbia, which plow for a thousand miles or more among
basaltic bastio