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288 WALTER BAILEY visions, and many had little or no money. Disease added its terrors to those of impending starvation. 5 Only two boats were running down to the Cascade rapids and transportation prices were high. But for the sending of relief parties from Oregon City and the kindly aid of the Hudson's Bay men, the immigrant camps at the old mission post must have become a scene of awful suffering. Among the last to arrive in this camp was the company commanded by Samuel K. Barlow. Captain Barlow did not like the situation at The Dalles and the prospect of exhausting his provisions by a long delay and his money for a dangerous passage down the river. 6 And Barlow, a true pioneer, pos- sessed that stern self reliance and restless ardor which causes a man, when he disapproves of the route of his fellows, to break a path of his own. At the early age of twenty he had left the home of his parents in Kentucky because his father was a slave holder and Samuel was bitterly opposed to human slavery. He had started west with the emigrants because his admired friend, Henry Clay, had been defeated for president and Barlow could not stay where he had fought a losing fight. True, to his principles,, Captain Barlow began looking for a new route into the Willamette valley. Two trails, he was told, had been opened across the mountains by stock drovers and horsemen. 7 One way was to swim the stock across the Colum- bia, skirt the mountains along the north bank and ferry back at Fort Vancouver. A second route was the old Indian trail south of Mount Hood, a path said to be steep and difficult. Captain Barlow determined to attempt the southern route with wagons. If there was already a trail it would probably be possible, he reasoned, to widen it into a wagon track. Says his son, William Barlow : 8 "After resting a few days and recruit- -m .! >! .:':': -.: '!.! :' .:.-;.--;"": "lir.-Jirj" [r; 5 Bancroft's Oregon, Vol. I, p. 516. 6 Evans' History of the Northwest Biography of S. K. Barlow. 7 Quarterly Oreg. Hist. Soc., Vol. Ill, p. 72. 8 Evans' History of the Northwest Biography of S. K. Barlow.