REBIRTH OF THE TRAIL

More from David Dary’s: The Oregon Trail; An American Saga Copyright 2004 First Edition Published by Alfred A. Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com/ small arm of Random House, Inc., New York.

Chapter Seventeen - - - Words copied from:
Page 310-311, & 319-321

History is not a remote Olympian bar of judgment, but a controversial arena in which each generation must make its own estimates of the past. Allan Nevins.

As the twentieth Century Began, Francis Parkman’s book on the Oregon Trail was reprinted by a New York publisher, but few people paid attention. It was a new century, and transportation by the transcontinental railroad and the automobile were over shadowing the past, including the struggles and hardships endured by those who had traveled overland by wagon over the Oregon Trail. Such things had become old-timer history. The romance and adventure of the Old West were still alive in novels like Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and in wild west shows, but the real West was changing. Much of the area had been settled, and new towns and cities dotted the western landscape. The railroads had already brought eastern big business west, and with it came corruption, including boss rule in many areas.

After timber reserves in the Great Lakes region were nearly depleted, loggers targeted the deep forests of Oregon, and as the twentieth century began, it became the nation’s third-ranking lumber-producing state. But then progressives in Oregon overthrew the timber barons’ rule and gained the adoption of a series of reform measures, including the initiative, the referendum, recall, and the direct primary.

The initiative enabled citizens to propose legislation: the referendum allowed them to vote for or against laws already passed by state lawmakers; recall permitted them to oust corrupt officials; and the direct primary (a reform measure first enacted by the Wisconsin legislature in 1903) bypassed party machinery and enabled the voters to choose their party candidates at the polls.

Collectively these reforms became known as the Oregon System and were widely adopted in many other areas of the nation to increase popular control of local and state governments.

* There is always more …. Let’s take a look at what I was going to end with, first …. A quote from something that Ezra Meeker wrote. Meeker, who on January 29th 1906, left his home in Puyallup, Washington to retrace the Oregon Trail with his ”prairie schooner” which incorporated parts from two other wagons that had also traversed the Oregon Trail in 1852. He ultimately wound up in Washington D.C. championing his cause which did in fact generate a bill for appropriations in the amount of $50,000 from a committee in Congress, to mark the Oregon Trail. *

“The difference between a civilized and an untutored people is in the application of experiences. The civilized man builds upon the foundation of the past, with hope and ambition for the future. The savage has neither past nor aspiration for the future. To keep the flame of patriotism alive, we must keep the memory of the past vividly before us. It was with these thoughts in mind that the expedition to mark the Old Oregon Trail
was undertaken.”

Although most Americans living between Oregon and the Atlantic coast were too involved in the problems of the present to pay much attention to the past, especially the old Oregon Trail over which so many emigrants had passed to settle the West, not everyone had forgotten. Ezra Meeker, born in Butler County, Ohio, in 1830, had traveled the road to Oregon in the 1852 with other emigrants. After an unsuccessful mercantile business in the town of Steilacoom, Meeker settled in the Puyallup Valley, where he founded the town of Puyallup in 1877, located a few miles southeast of modern Tacoma.

There he realized the fertile soil could grow abundant crops. He planted hops, used to give the bitter flavor to malt liquors, and by 1885 was wealthy and known as the “Hop King of the World.” His business took him to Europe, where in London he met Queen Victoria. Everything was fine until 1891 when an infestation of hop aphids decimated his crops. He lost a fortune but managed to keep his home in Puyallup. Soon he dabbled in other enterprises and made four trips to the Klondike in search of gold. He found little.

Back in Puyallup, he began writing a romance novel about coming west, in which he expressed his sympathy for the plight of the Indians. He also expressed sympathy for Chinese emigrants who were treated as outcasts in the Pacific Northwest. By 1900 he realized that too many Americans had forgotten the Oregon Trail. Meeker, then sevnty-seven, decided to memorialize the road by retracing the route he had taken in 1852 and marking it.

More from David Dary’s: “The Oregon Trail; An American Saga” Copyright 2004 First Edition Published by Alfred A. Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com/ small arm of Random House, Inc., New York.

Chapter Seventeen - - - Words copied from Page 310-311, & 319-321