The story of Oregon Author:Julian Hawthorne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: by a gold-laced cap and a superior manner. " Well, young man," he broke out at last, " I've sailed into the four quarters of this globe, and seen most of the peo... more »ple in it; but I must say that a cheekier and more audacious set of fellows than you Americans I never ran up against before!" General J. W. Nesmyth speaks to the same effect, in different words. "I never knew," says he," so fine a population, as a whole, as I saw in Oregon. All were honest, because there was nothing to steal; sober, because there was no liquor to drink ; there were no misers, because there was nothing to hoard ; all were industrious, because it was work or starve. There were no temptations, because there were no vices, and all were virtuous, because there was no opportunity to be otherwise." But, once more, the pioneers of Oregon were the right men in the right place ; and we shall presently see that when need came to develop and defend their country, the ability and the courage to do so were never found wanting. CHAPTER VIII. THE LOG-CABIN. Astob and others, as we have already seen, had, in the early years of the century, sent ships to the Columbia round Cape Horn. It might seem that this method of approach offered many advantages over the overland route ; there were, at least, no Indians, and no imminent danger of starvation. But people living away from the Atlantic seaboard, being accustomed to wagons and unused to ships, naturally preferred the former. Emigrants from the Southern Atlantic States sometimes followed a trail throTigh Mexico, and sometimes went by Nicaragua or Panama. To most the Cape Horn voyage seemed too long, though in practice it was often a good deal shorter f than the passage across the Isthmus. Nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of gold, in 1848, the stea...« less