Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/145

Rh hundred wagons pass in three days, and a neighboring burial place grew from one to fifty-two fresh graves in those three days.

The sad recital is ended, and the victory won. The grizzled pioneers unhitched their oxen from the wagons and hitched them up to the plow. They laid away their weapons of warfare and builded a state, and, quoting Sam Simpson, a pioneer's son:

What started this two thousand mile emigration, that crossing the plains and the mountains, settled the Willamette valley and founded the city of Portland?

The answer may be to get land, and lots of it, for the emigrant. That was doubtless a moving reason for thousands. But it was not the real fact that started the stone to roll. The land was here in plenty, as good as could be found, but not so much better than millions of acres which the emigrants passed over in the Platte valley, as to justify the long and perilous journey to Oregon to get a chance for it, and not knowing what government might control it. The land was in the possession of the Indians, it could not run away, and there would be plenty of time to get it after the government title was settled.

But something out of the ordinary set the frontier to thinking about it, and from thinking they were moved to action. What was that original exciting cause?

It was for the glory of God and the salvation of souls that Columbus appealed to Queen Isabella for ships and money to discover a new world. It was the motive power of religion that moved everything down to the period of the rebellion of the American colonies against old England. It was religion, the right to worship God according to the dictates of an untrammeled conscience that huddled the Puritans on to the Mayflower and sent them starving, sickening, and dying across the stormy ocean to the bleak and unhospitable shores of New England. The religionists that worshiped according to the dictates of kings and popes, drove away with bitter persecution, the religionists who wanted to make their own creeds and sit under their own vines and apple trees. And so they came to America.