Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/175



Rh

First of the active forces of pioneer progress on the Pacific Coast was the quest for gold.^ This energy was general in area, from California to the Yukon. It drew world-wide interest and brought a cosmopolitan immigration by land and sea. It started activities not before known. It explored every nook and cranny of this vast region. The oxteam pioneers were a slow moving race before the gold era drove them from Middle-West habits to new industries of various farm production, transportation and trade. The resistant habits were strong in the Willamette Valley of Oregon — a district proverbial for retarded growth.^

The primitive life of the Oregon pioneers prior to the gold movement, the isolation, the remoteness from currents of the world and the Nation ; the hardships of family existence; the absence of nearly all the necessary comforts of the later day; the lack of markets and the narrow range of industry—all this is but faintly realized by the present generation.^

1 ThtgfAd dinrings of the pioneer time were placers, chiefly in the beds of streams. The surface gold was gathered up in a short time in each locality. The workings of cjuartz gold, bv costly machinery, came later and was carried on in special localities; likewise "hydraulic" methods.

2 Settlement of Willamette Valley began some thirty years prior to the gold period.

3 Description of pioneer life, by Harvey W. Scott, appears in the Jewish Tribune, of Portland, December 19, 1909; The Oregonian, June i6, 1881; June 19. 1902.

.