Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/254

{{running header|216}|}} the wheels would creak and then shrilly whine, and the caravan must halt until an animal was killed to furnish fat to grease the axles. Swimming streams, bogged in quicksands, and deep in dusty ruts, the caravan reached Fort Laramie at the foot of the eastern slope of the mountains.

Here wagons were left and their contents transferred to pack aimals. Up the eastern slopes of South Pass the caravan wound its way, pack animals, outriders to protect from marauding Indians, and footweary caravan men, moving no faster than the slowest individual man or animal.

On the morning of August 10, 1835, the caravan reached the summit of the pass, and here Marcus Whitman, Doctor of Medicine, educated by twelve years of study and country practice, crossed that imaginary line which there marks the continental divide, the first graduate of an American medical school to stand on the western side of that line. He was the pioneer of pioneers of all that throng of physicians and surgeons who for more than a hundred years have ministered to the bodily ills of millions of human beings in this great western empire.

Standing at the continental divide on that August morning one hundred and one years ago, he looked with telescopic eye first to the west and then far to the northwest, where a year later,—in the words of that poet native to the town of his boyhood days—Marcus Whitman was to