Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/381

Rh Ponce de Leons in search of fountains of renewed youth in Oregon.

Monetary disturbances had made business stagnant all over the country from 1837 to 1841. Many had gone to the wall, and had been compelled to see their homes turned over to others. The hard times were felt keenest in the then farthest west. They were so far inland that commercial intercourse with the rest of the world was almost totally cut off. What traffic they had was carried on by slow, laborious and expensive processes. Railroad building had not progressed so as to give a hope, hardly even an intimation, of its wonderful solution of the problem of maintaining a high civilization far inland. By going to Oregon they would, as they thought of it, again be on the open shores of the greater sea, within easy reach of the highway of the civilizations of the world. Not often, perhaps, were their motives formulated. These were allowed to rest in their minds in the most naive form of impulse. Col. Geo. B. Currey, in his "Occasional Address': before the Pioneer Association, in 1887, endorses the following as the best reason he ever got. It was, as he says, "from a genuine westerner," who said he came "because the thing wasn't fenced in, and nobody dared to keep him out."

The western border of Missouri was the natural jumping off place for the plunge into the wilderness. The settlements there had extended out like a plank beyond the line of the border elsewhere. The Ohio and the Missouri, with a short stretch of the Mississippi, had furnished the line of least resistance to the westward movement.

Each recurring spring tide from 1842 on witnessed the gathering of hosts at points on the Missouri, from Independence, near the confluence of the Kansas with the Missouri, north to what is now Council Bluffs. They