“Then I may start soon for Oregon?” I
demanded.
“You shall start to-morrow,” he answered.
THE WHOA-HAW TRAIL
There are no pleasures where women
are not.
—Marie
de Romba.
How shall I tell of those stirring times in such way
that readers who live in later and different days
may catch in full their flavor? How shall I write
now so that at a later time men may read of the way
America was taken, may see what America then was and
now is, and what yet, please God! it may be?
How shall be set down that keen zest of a nation’s
youth, full of ambition and daring, full of contempt
for obstacles, full of a vast and splendid hope?
How shall be made plain also that other and stronger
thing which so many of those days have mentioned to
me, half in reticence—that feeling that,
after all, this fever of the blood, this imperious
insistence upon new lands, had under it something
more than human selfishness?
I say I wish that some tongue or brush or pen might
tell the story of our people at that time. Once
I saw it in part told in color and line, in a painting
done by a master hand, almost one fit to record the
spirit of that day, although it wrought in this instance
with another and yet earlier time. In this old
canvas, depicting an early Teutonic tribal wandering,
appeared some scores of human figures, men and women
half savage in their look, clad in skins, with fillets
of hide for head covering; men whose beards were strong
and large, whose limbs, wrapped loose in hides, were
strong and large; women, strong and large, who bore
burdens on their backs. Yet in the faces of all
these there shone, not savagery alone, but intelligence
and resolution. With them were flocks and herds
and beasts of burden and carts of rude build; and beside
these traveled children. There were young and
old men and women, and some were gaunt and weary,
but most were bold and strong. There were weapons
for all, and rude implements, as well, of industry.
In the faces of all there was visible the spirit of
their yellow-bearded leader, who made the center of
the picture’s foreground.
I saw the soul of that canvas—a splendid
resolution—a look forward, a purpose, an
aim to be attained at no counting of cost. I say,
as I gazed at that canvas, I saw in it the columns
of my own people moving westward across the Land,
fierce-eyed, fearless, doubting nothing, fearing nothing.
That was the genius of America when I myself was young.
I believe it still to be the spirit of a triumphant
democracy, knowing its own, taking its own, holding
its own. They travel yet, the dauntless figures
of that earlier day. Let them not despair.
No imaginary line will ever hold them back, no mandate
of any monarch ever can restrain them.
In our own caravans, now pressing on for the general
movement west of the Missouri, there was material
for a hundred canvases like yonder one, and yet more
vast. The world of our great western country was
then still before us. A stern and warlike people
was resolved to hold it and increase it. Of these
west-bound I now was one. I felt the joy of that
thought. I was going West!
