Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/23

Rh were all influential in making known the agricultural resources of Oregon.

The finding of the resources was one thing and the development was another. .A work of heroism was before the people as great as anything ever done. Fortunate was it for the social evolution of Oregon that a population existed equal to the emergency and alert for the effort. The early missionaries had already led the way. They had proved to be genuine pathfinders. Attracted at first by the religious needs of the natives, they had become the central stimulus to settlement. Care for the native races was overbalanced by preparation for their supplanting by the white race. Two streams of population joined on the distant territory. New England, the first mother of Oregon's social life, sent by the old sea route a population which was strong of purpose and possessed of enough capital to become the merchants of new colony. The Mississippi Valley sent a population to till the soil which was full of the vigor of a frontier life and composite of various elements of an American population. To the valley had been coming settlers from both the North and the South as well as some of the foreign element, then beginning to arrive in America. It was a population determined to win from the resources of nature a competence and to establish for itself homes. It came to establish a settlement that should be permanent in its character. It was fitted to occupy a region which required a population accustomed to the hardships and the dangers of a frontier life. Any other kind would not have been suited to the conditions and would speedily have given up and contributed nothing to the social evolution.