Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/52



42 LINDSAY APPLEGATE

The efforts of the Hudson's Bay Company to put down the road, proved an eminent failure. Its superior advantages were better and better known and appreciated every year. It never ceased to be an important route of travel, and a large portion of the population of our State entered by this channel. It is a very significant fact that the great thoroughfare of today, from the Willamette to the Siskiyou chain, and thence out through the Lake country and on to the Humboldt, departs rarely from the route blazed out by the road company, thirty-two years ago.

Those who are conversant with the facts, know that that por- tion of the route, from the Humboldt to the Lake country pre- sents no serious obstacles in the way of the construction of a railroad, and had the Central Pacific company located their road on that route, from Humboldt as far as Goose lake, and thence down Pitt river to the Sacramento valley, they would doubtless have saved millions of money in the original cost of the road, as well as in keeping it in order, since the snowfall would never have been seriously in the way, even in the severest winters.

In conclusion, I will recall the names of the road company, with a few facts relative to their history. I regret that it is not practicable to make this record more ample, but the company was made up, almost to a man, of active, energetic characters, who were not satisfied with a quiet, spiritless life, and many of them long ago were lost to the little community, "over in Polk," where they first settled, as they moved to other portions of the State or went out into adjacent territories to seek their fortunes. Under the circumstances, it has been impracticable to learn the whereabouts of some of them, or to gather such facts relative to their later history as would amplify and add interest to their biographies. Perhaps few companies of men ever performed such a campaign without repeated quarrels and even serious altercations, but the members of the Old South Road Company bore together the trials and privations of the expedition with a "forgiving and forbearing" spirit, and their