Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/225



THE QUARTERLY

of the

Oregon Historical Society

VOLUME XVI SEPTEMBER, 1915 NUMBER g

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE OREGON EMIGRATING COMPANIES.

By HARRISON C. DALE.

A superficial analogy has frequently been drawn between the westward movement of the American people and the Teutonic folk migrations of the fourth and following centuries. Both the Germanic nomads and the pioneers of the Far West traversed the country in much the same fashion, moving en masse, men, women, and children with all that they possessed. Many of those, however, who set out on the great trek across the so-called American Desert most of them probably were, un- like the early Germans, entirely unused to a prolonged life on the move. Some, to be sure, belonged to that class of roving pioneers that always finds a population of more than ten to the square mile too dense for comfort and is constantly pushing on to the fringe and beyond the fringe of civilization, but a great number came from the more staid and permanent regions of the East and the Mississippi valley and had been accustomed for generations to life in settled communities, where food, water, fuel, and shelter could be obtained in something like normal proportions. Most of the earlier emigrants, moreover, knew next to nothing about the nature of the country to be traversed, a fact which only served to augment the actual dangers.