Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/176



It is a far cry from the year 1910 to that of 1859. The man who today looks back over the trail blazed by civilization while making the history of the Inland Empire views the wonderful development of the interim, exhibiting as it does the progress of the world, with far greater credulity than would have been exercised by the man who gazed into the dubious vista of the future from the untamed days of 1859 had a prophet pictured to him the things that have transpired. Men who as adults linked their lives with the West in that year are today scarce; yet a few there are whose experience spans the two score and eleven years and who have in memory the whole bewildering vision.

Mr. Lawson Stockman, of Garfield, Washington, is one of these few men. His experience in the West during those longago years was replete with activity and a great deal of the life of the country as it was then lived came under his observation. Much of it elicited his own energies.

In the winter of 1858-9 Mr. Stockman formed a partnership with a man named Adams at Iowa City and on the 1st of March, 1859, the two men headed for the plains with a wagon and four yoke of oxen. At that time the West was a long, long way from the East, and the road which threaded its way across the great American plains was strewn with the wreckage of caravans and the graves of ambitious men.

In preparing for this journey there were two things which figured very prominently in the travelers' calculations: A supply of provisions sufficient to last the entire trip, and the hostile Indians more or less thickly scattered along the entire route.