FROM THE WEST TO THE WEST [Illustration: _Jean beheld a tall, sunburned young man._—_Page 185_] FROM THE WEST TO THE WEST Across the Plains to Oregon BY ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY With Frontispiece in Color [Illustration] CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1905 COPYRIGHT A. C. MCCLURG & CO. 1905 Published April 7, 1905 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. TO THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF OREGON AND HER RISEN AND REMAINING PIONEERS I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE THIS BOOK ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNIWAY PREFACE Not from any desire for augmented fame, or for further notoriety than has long been mine (at least within the chosen bailiwick of my farthest and best beloved West), have I consented to indite these pages. The events of pioneer life, which form the groundwork of this story, are woven into a composite whole by memory and imagination. But they are not personal, nor do they present the reader, except in a fragmentary and romantic sense, with the actual, individual lives of borderers I have known. The story, nevertheless, is true to life and border history; and, no matter what may be the fate of the book, the facts it delineates will never die. Fifty years ago, as an illiterate, inexperienced settler, a busy, overworked child-mother and housewife, an impulse to write was born within me, inherited from my Scottish ancestry, which no lack of education or opportunity could allay. So I wrote a little book which I called “Captain Gray’s Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon.” Measured by time and distance as now computed, that was ages ago. The iron horse and the telegraph had not crossed the Mississippi; the telephone and the electric light were not; and there were no cables under the sea. Life’s twilight’s shadows are around me now. The good husband who shaped my destiny in childhood has passed to the skies; my beloved, beautiful, and only daughter has also risen; my faithful sons have founded homes and families of their own. Sitting alone in my deserted but not lonely home, I have yielded to a demand that for several years has been reaching me by person, post, and telephone, requesting the republication of my first little story, which passed rapidly through two editions, and for forty years has been out of print. In its stead I have written this historical novel.