The journey back over the old Oregon Trail by ox team was made during my seventy-seventh year. On January 29, 1906, I left my home in Puyallup, Washington, and on November 29, 1907, just twenty-two months later to the day, I reached Washington, our national capital, with my cattle and my old prairie schooner. Not all of this time was spent in travel, of course; a good deal of it was taken up in furthering the purpose of the trip by arranging for the erection and dedication of monuments to mark the Trail. To accomplish the purpose of marking the trail would have been enough to make the journey worth while to me, besides all the interest of freshening my recollections of old times and reviving old memories. There is not space in this book to dwell on all the contrasts that came to my mind constantly,--of the uncleared forests with the farms and orchards of today, of the unbroken prairie lands with the ranches and farms and cities that now border the old trail from the Rockies to the Mississippi. There is nothing like an ox-team journey, I maintain, to make a person realize this country, realize its size, the number of its people, and the variety of conditions in which they live and of occupations by which they live. I wish I could share with every boy and girl in the country the panorama view that unrolled itself before me in this journey from tidewater to tidewater. The ox team was chosen as a typical reminder of pioneer days. The Oregon Trail, it must be remembered, is essentially an ox-team trail. No more effective instrument, therefore, could have been chosen to attract attention, arouse enthusiasm, and secure aid in forwarding the work, than this living symbol of the old days. Indeed, too much attention, in one sense, was attracted. I had scarcely driven the outfit away from my own dooryard before the wagon and wagon cover, and even the map of the old trail on the sides of the cover, began to be defaced. First I noticed a name or two written on the wagon bed, then a dozen or more, all stealthily placed there, until the whole was so closely covered that there was no room for more. Finally the vandals began carving initials on the wagon bed and cutting off pieces to carry away. Eventually I put a stop to such vandalism by employing special police, posting notices, and nabbing some offenders in the very act. Give me Indians on the Plains to contend with; give me fleas or even the detested sage-brush ticks to burrow into the flesh; but deliver me from cheap notoriety seekers! I had decided to take along one helper, and a man by the name of Herman Goebel went as far as The Dalles with the outfit. There William Marden joined me for the journey across the Plains. Marden stayed with me for three years, and proved to be faithful and helpful.