Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/47



The founder and early patrons and supporters of Umpqua Academy belonged to that incomparable band of men and women known, and' to be remembered, as the Oregon Pioneers. Most of them had crossed the plains with ox teams, consuming from five to six months in the journey, hauling their families and their effects in their immigrant wagons or "prairie schooners," as they were called.

In that long journey those sturdy people had encountered difficulties and endured hardships, a true recitation of which, at this later day, is calculated to stagger the credulity of the hearers. Those immigrants who succeeded in reaching the Oregon Country were true types of the "survival of the fittest," and in their short lexicon there was no such word as fail.

Those who had been neighbors and 1 acquaintances in the "States" as well as those who had met and become acquainted on the way and shared in common the hardships and dangers of the journey, settled here and there in the Willamette, Umpqua and Rogue river valleys of Western Oregon. For some years after such settlement these good people interchanged periodical visits to the homes of each other, sometimes for a distance of more than a hundred miles, and a feeling akin to family relationship prevailed People were better acquainted, though living more than a hundred miles apart, in those early days than are families living on the opposite sides of the streets of our cities today.

James H. Wilbur, or Father Wilbur, as he is better known, had labored at Oregon City, Portland and Salem in church and educational work, and when he finally went to Southern Oregon and took up a donation land claim and established! an academy at the place, henceforth to be called! Wilbur, it may be readily understood why the people throughout the settled portion of Oregon Territory, should generally know of and