Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/338



326 JOHN E. REES

In fact the reports by the Indians of a large river flowing from the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains into the Pacific Ocean caused some cartographers to represent on their maps, by dotted lines, a River of the West, after which it became the primary object and the goal of navigators of all nations to seek for and find this Indian stream to whose tra- ditional account were added many by the white man until 1792, when Captain Robert Gray solved the aboriginal legend and entered, for the first time, the channel of this river of many names, notwithstanding which he gave it another, "Columbia", after his vessel, and by which name the river has usually been known since. 27

The next notable use of the word "Oregon", in literature, after its first application by Captain Carver in 1778, was by William Cullen Bryant in his poem, Thanatopsis, in 1812. "Thanatopsis" is a Greek word meaning a contemplation of death. It was said of the poet Bryant that if he was ever a child and thought as a child no one knew when it was. The widespread beauty of nature, her silent movements, her cease- less changes, the endless mass of humanity drifting ever toward the chasm of death, these were familiar themes over which he contemplated in his boyhood days and it was as a boy of eighteen years he wrote Thanatopsis. The splendid thought expressed in this poem comes as "a voice out of the wilder- ness" lifting one above the weary avocations of life to a purer faith in a life beyond. The warm human sympathy of the master poet is here overpowering. As proofs of his stately thoughts on the gravity and universality of death he appeals to the solemnity of the forest and the wilderness, for the dark forests of the western coast of America were quite as familiar to the average reader then, as was the wilderness in the Libyan Desert on the African Coast and it was that idea rather than for "meter" that the word "Oregon" was used by him. He said, "Take the wings of the morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, or lose thyself in the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound save his own dashings, yet

27 Lyman's Columbia River, Chap. 3.