Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/182



furnishing fruit-trees to settlers. There are about a dozen other hamlets in this district, which are waiting for transportation facilities.

In this county resides, with his sons, the aged Lindsay Apple- gate, brother of the “ Sage of Yoncalla,” and a historic character. His father was Daniel Applegate, who fought in the Revolutionary War, and who married a daughter of John Lindsay, one of Daniel Boone’s associates in the settlement of Kentucky. In the year 1823 Lindsay Applegate accompanied General Ashley in an expedition up the Missouri,—the first American company that fitted out for fur-hunting in the Rocky Mountains. Twenty years later he helped break the first wagon-road into Oregon, where he has borne his part in building up a prosperous commonwealth. Soon the last of this class of Amerian State-builders will have passed away with the times which called them forth, but the coming generations should not be permitted to consign them to oblivion. The noblest thing that the Oregon poet, Joaquin Miller, has written refers to

“ Those brave men buffeting the West With lifted faces. Tull were they Of great endeavor. Brave and true As stern crusader. . ..

Made strong with hope they dared to do.

What brave endeavor to endure !

What patient hope, when hope was past!

What still surrender at the last A thousand leagues from hope! How pure They lived, how proud they died !”

A drawback to the settlement of East Oregon has been the large amount of land held by wagon-road companies, who in the past, under a pretence of building a needed highway to the Idaho or Oregon mines, secured grants from Congress upon terms never honorably complied with. These grants, which will eventually be declared forfeited, are still unsettled. Another class of idle lands is that fraudulently taken up under the Swamp Land Act, large tracts of which are being restored to the government and opened for settlement along with the other government lands. There are, however, good tracts free to e