Page:Debt of Pacific Northwest to Dr. Joseph Schafer.djvu/3

90 references to the bicycles, but altogether the two men played up very little this original and dramatic episode of historical investigation.

Only last year, Dr. Schafer recalled the experience:

"It will illustrate one of Professor Young's Oregon interests if I add that the journey West was made in his company, he having spent six weeks at Madison, Wisconsin, in summer study, with the design of returning via the Oregon trail, which he was bent on describing in the next number of the Oregon Historical Quarterly founded by him that year as the organ of the State Historical Society. We went to Omaha by train, outfitted with second-hand bicycles, which we rode from Julesburg to Fort Laramie and again from Casper to Independence Rock, Split Rock, South Pass, and Rock Springs. Historical exactness calls for a modification of the phrase "we rode." At all events, if we did not ride all that weary way, we were aware that we had the wheels with us."

Here were two men—one 42, the other 33—who were to give incalculable benefits through their writings on Oregon history, boyishly going forth in this way. And the vigor and freshness of what they recorded is confirmation of the fact that those who would tell with vividness and verisimilitude of adventure must themselves have the spirit of adventure.

That enduring article of Professor Young's in the Quarterly was one effect of their ingenious project. Then, five years later, in A History of the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Schafer, because of it, was able to write the following eloquent and memorable paragraph:

"These facts tell the story of how the natural course of the Pacific Coast's development was changed by the magic of gold. The long list of American explorers, traders, and missionaries, whose deeds and sacrifices glorify the early history of the Pacific Northwest, were largely forgotten by a nation entranced with the story of the "Forty-niners." The far-reaching influence of Oregon as the oldest American territory on the Pacific Coast faded quickly from the memories of men. The Oregon Trail was already deep worn through the sand hills along the Platte and Sweetwater, Bear River, and the Portneuf, by the wagons of the Oregon pioneers; it was lined with the crumbling bones of their cattle, and marked by the graves of their dead; yet instantly, after the passage of the thronging multitudes of '49, it became the "California Trail," and to this day most men know it by no other name."