THE PROCESS OF SELECTION IN OREGON PIONEER SETTLEMENT.
In the days of the early Oregon pioneers the narrative of Lewis and Clark's explorations to the Pacific Coast had become little more than a tradition to the frontier people of the West. The wild stories of mountain trappers, told by camp fires, and colored by vivid recollections of real privations among mountain defiles—these formed the picture in the popular mind along the frontier of the difficulties to be overcome in a journey across the Rockies. As long as these reiterated stories took their measure of endurance from the wanderings of missionaries and mountain trappers, the problem of their influence might be a simple one; but when the question of taking women and children over the dreary wastes of wide deserts and pathless steeps of mountain cliffs was raised, other considerations were at once added; for how could these trusts be transported over bridgeless and fordless streams? How insured against hunger and thirst, and how kept out of reach of the danger of attack by hostile tribes of Indians?
The object of this brief paper is to outline a conviction of the writer that the difficulties in the way of a migration to Oregon—as these difficulties were seen by the people of the frontier states—formed a selecting test of the kind of people who alone could go to Oregon across the mountains in those days—a real and practical natural selection of a new people for a new community.
Without entering into the hackneyed question of the agency of Doctor Whitman in securing Oregon for the United States, we may say Doctor Whitman was no
