Their first joint activity was to enter into the organization of the Columbia Maternal Association and thus become the founders of the first Woman's Club west of the Rockies and the second to be formed anywhere in the United States. Its preamble closes thus : "We, the subscribers, agree to form ourselves into an association for the purpose of adopting such rules as are best calculated to assist us in the right performance of our maternal duties."
Not only did these first Americans in permanent residence in Old Oregon point the way and prove its practicability, but they gave aid and comfort to those who faced the perils of the way to follow; not only did they stimulate emigration from the East, but they succored it at the journey's end; not only did they urge America to extend her sway over these new regions, but they were the leaders in formulating a provisional government on the American plan. Here, as everywhere, the American home was the first unit of democracy.
Theodore Winthrop said in the Fifties: "These Oregon people carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American idea . . . carrying there a religion, two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans, — with such materials, that western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of life and thought."
Dr. Ellsworth Huntington, in our own day, with scientific imagination has called it "the charmed land," the "new cradle of the blond Aryan." It is the land which has known no flag but the Stars and Stripes — won by American homes.
- They will take, they will hold.
- By the spade in the mould,
- By the seed in the soil,
- By the sweat and the toil.
- By the plow and the loom,
- By the school and the home."
The mountain men were right. The honorable Hudson Bay Company could not drive them back, for they were not pilgrims and strangers; they came as those who sought homes, bringing their Lares and Penates with them.
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