Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/251



, there was much singing among the emigrants on their slow way, with many evening camps, across the plains.

It is not too much to expect that, as the long cow-columns kept moving westward, there would have been developed an Emigration Song, or several of them, but if there was such a covered wagon anthem, it cannot be located.

Other indigenous songs that may have been composed after the emigrants arrived and made their homes in Oregon in the 40's and 50's, if they were composed and sung to any extent, have not been preserved in the principal libraries of the state. No clues of their present existence could be secured from the good recollectors among the prominent second-generation pioneers still surviving in Portland and at Oregon City; historians could recall nothing in the way of actual songs from their wide reading or numerous interviews; the leading musicians, in their familiarity with folk songs, had no acquaintance with Oregon Trail or Oregon pioneer ballads. Music has been a neglected field of research among state historians; no one has been interested enough or well enough informed to give it anything like the attention that almost every other topic has received in books, in newspaper articles or in the Quarterly of the Historical Society. It looks very much as though it is too late now ever to do much about the folk music of early Oregon,