Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/989



The beginning of human society in all ages, and in all parts of the world has already been a subject of profound interest to all reading and thinking persons. The unceasing drift of the centuries which has carried the leading race of mankind continuously around the earth with its face to the west, and its back to the rising sun, while producing the vigorous and aggressive nations of the world, shows also the varying influences of environment. Transplanted to the western hemisphere, the Caucasian is not the same man on the St. Lawrence that he is on the Hudson, and not the same in Virginia that was developed in Massachusetts. And confronted by the savage foes of the Ohio valley the Scotch-Irishman is not the same man that raised his oats and turnips in Scotland or mined his peat and roasted his potatoes in Ireland. And passing over the dividing line between the "east" and the "west"—"The tall and pillared Alleghenies,"—is found a people in the great valley of the Ohio and Mississippi as diverse in thoughts and inclinations as was ever Puritan and Cavalier. The modern Ben Franklin (Horace Greeley) achieved a great reputation he little deserved in reiterating the advice—^"Go west young man! go west; and grow up with the country." The American man was going west, and still further west to Oregon, before the sage of the Tribune promulgated his panacea for hard times and sure fortune. It took the Teutonic tribes of ancient Germany fifteen hundred years to work their conquests of time and space across to England and down to the south end of the Spanish peninsula. And after Columbus had spanned the Atlantic, and England and Spain had made peace and divided up the New "World between the royal sovereigns in 1606, it took one hundred and sixty years for the English colonists to possess and hold the region between the Atlantic ocean and the Ohio valley. But after the "Go West Americans" had thrown off the British yoke, and achieved their freedom to go west, they covered the great space between the Allegheny mountains and the Missouri river—four or five times the area between Philadelphia and Pittsburg—in less than 25 years. And after planting their stakes west of the Missouri and raising a few crops of corn, they loaded up their wagons, hitched up their oxen and cleared the remainder of the