Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/20

10 as a national memorial highway, and will be celebrated in song and story, every mile of which has the tenderest associations of hardship and suffering, but also of high purpose and stern determination; and yet the Oregon trail was in the strictest sense a derivative of the Lewis and Clark trail. For nearly twenty years the Lewis and Clark route up the Missouri River had been the only one used to reach the Rocky-mountain wilderness, but in the fall of 1823 a party of trappers, pushing westward from the Yellowstone and desirous of avoiding the implacable Blackfeet on the Upper Missouri, turned to the south and discovered in South Pass, an easy crossing of the Rocky Mountains. The region beyond on the headwaters of the Green and Snake rivers, and in the basin of the Great Salt Lake, was found to be rich in furs. Henceforth to some point in this region the annual cavalcades of the fur companies would come and there meet their own trappers, the free trappers, and the Indians of all the interior country. This was the annual rendezvous for trading, for the delivery of the season's catch of furs, and for equipment for the next year's activity. In making this annual round trip from Saint Louis the original route into this transmontane country, the half-circle route along the Missouri, was naturally abandoned for a great cut-off from the western borders of Missouri to the South Pass. A direct route northwestward across the plains of present Kansas and Nebraska to the Platte, up the Platte and the North Fork and its tributary, the Sweetwater, was found to be the finest natural highway in the world. To reach Oregon the pioneers took this great cut off of the Lewis and Clark trail, and from its western terminus on the upper waters of the Snake they had but to follow the route of Hunt's Astor party until the original Lewis and Clark trail was struck again on the Columbia. The Lewis