Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/607

 gold. The long list of American explorers, traders and mis sionaries, 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 terri tory on the Pacific Coast faded quickly from the memories of men.

The Oregon Trail was already deep worn through the sandhills 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.

7 J. HENRY BROWN

J. Henry Brown, the old Salem historian, gathered material with fatigueless energy. His nephew, Burt Brown Barker vice-president of the University of Oregon, has a stack of manuscript and pamph lets about two feet thick that he left on the Indian wars of Oregon and Washington. He was born in Illinois on August 4, 183 1, and came to Oregon as a boy of 16, arriving in the fall of 1847. His grandfather opened the first store in Salem. He himself became by profession a printer and during his spare time a historian. "He re moved to Portland about 1880. He was a good observer and had a faculty for classifying events. Though a steady and efficient work man, he did not accumulate much of this world's goods." Harvey W. Scott said of him the day after his death in Portland on August 16, 1898: "Many a more pretentious man has deserved less than John Henry Brown. While lacking many of the qualities which dignify and adorn life, Brown still had in him the spirit and the force of a very high and worthy enthusiasm. His volume on early Oregon, while falling far below what discriminating criticism calls history, i s, nevertheless, a work of great value. I t represents an enormous amount of labor, pursued under extraordinary circumstances of disability and self-sac rifice, out of sheer love for this country and its historic past. Much of what Brown preserved might otherwise have been wholly lost. I t must be remembered, too, that Brown was, in a sense, the founder