Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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“Some years ago, I was in the Museum in Portland, Oregon, listening to George Himes, Secretary of the Oregon Historical Association, tell the story of the coming of the pioneers into the then Territory of Washington. I shall never forget the vivid recital of an experience he had as a boy of ten with the trail blazers into the far Northwest when they had to kill three of their oxen to use their hides to splice two ropes to let their twenty-nine wagons down a cliff that barred their way. Mr. Himes showed me during this visit one of the corners of the Museum in which he had relics that had come from every state east of the Mississippi River. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘is a clock that used to tick time in Vermont; here is a Franklin stove with which they used to warm themselves in Pennsylvania; here is a cradle in which they rocked the baby across the plains from Indiana and here is a scythe with which they mowed blue grass in Kentucky.’ ‘Yes, Mr. Himes,’ said I, ‘these people came bearing not only their scythes, and their stoves, their clocks and their cradles; they came carrying America across our continent; they came sprinkling the names of American towns and cities dear to their hearts upon the map of every state that they crossed; they came planting their school houses and churches; they came telling their children of the making of America; they came with American ideals throbbing in their hearts. They came, if you please, stretching the warp of our national life from one end of our country to the other. They stretched it stout and taut and true.’