Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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One is in Washington, the Federal Capital. It is the Washington Monument. It marks the beginning of a great nation in its expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It commemorates also one of the noblest leaders, who ever guided that nation in its Destiny.

The second is in Kansas City. It commemorates the soldiers, who perished in the World War; but it also marks the beginning of a great racial path in that expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That racial path is the Overland Trail. Here set out in the last trek of humanity westward, not an army of soldiers in rank formation, but an army of Pioneers, who conquered a wilderness and transformed a desert into a garden; and they accomplished in a little more than half a century, what the Old World did not achieve in sixty centuries. They conquered by sheer dogged dauntless courage an empire half the area of Europe. Five thousand people—men, women, children—perished from hunger, from hardship, from Indian raids, in a single year on the Oregon Trail. If you want to realize the epic heroism of such pioneer heroism, compare that mortality loss to the army death list of a single little war in Europe over some principality not the size of a single county in the states bordering the Overland Trail! Then you grasp what the great racial highway means in American history. You realize why to the West, it is sacred as the very altar stairs of a saint’s monument in Asia or Europe. It, too, is dyed in sacrificial martyr blood. It, too, is worn by the pilgrims’ feet in traces which time can never efface.