Page:Oregon Literature by Horner.djvu/14

6 found a land of marvelous beauty. They found extended prairies, with luxuriant verdure. They found grand and gloomy forests, majestic rivers, and mountains covered with eternal snow; but they found no friends to greet them, no homes to go to, nothing but the genial heavens and the generous earth to give them consolation and hope. I cannot tell how they lived; nor how they supplied their numerous wants of family life. All these things are mysteries to everyone, excepting to those who can give their solution from actual experience." But of this one thing be assured, under these trying circumstances, life with them grew to be real, earnest, and simple. They were fearless, yet God-fearing; no book save the Bible, Walker's dictionary, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few others of like sort; solid books, solid thought, solid men—three elements that enter into substantial literature.

A recent number of the "Daily Oregonian" tells us that the original type of the Oregon pioneer began his career with the settlement of New England4n 1620, and he ended it when he reached the Pacific. It took him about 250 years to conquer nature and the Indian from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Oregon pioneer in his deeds outran even the prophetic vision of the great American novelist who left him in Nebraska struggling on his way along the Platte, and today Nebraska is ten years younger in statehood than Oregon because