"I have a strong desire for that field of labor.... I feel greatly encouraged to go on in every sense, only, I feel my unfitness for the work; but I know in whom I have trusted, and with whom are the fountains of wisdom.... You need not be anxious especially for your health or safety, but for your usefulness to the cause of Missions and the souls of our benighted fellow-men." Dr. Whitman was married early in 1836, and the couple were driven by sleigh from Elmira, New York, to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where they took a canal-boat over the Alleghany Portage Railway on their way westward. Their principal companions were the Rev. Henry H. Spaulding, a graduate of Western Reserve College,--two or three years Whitman's junior,--and wife, and Mr. William H. Gray; there were also two teamsters and two Indian boys, whom Dr. Whitman had brought East with him. Joining the caravan of the American Fur Company at Council Bluffs, they reached Fort Laramie early in June, and the South Pass on the following Fourth of July, where six years later Fremont raised an American flag and gained the immortal name of "Pathfinder." It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently the historic importance and significance of the advent of these women into the country beyond the Great Divide in Whitman's light wagon and cart; true, Ashley, Bridger, and Bonneville had taken wagons into the Rockies and left them there, but it was for this sturdy and determined physician to take a woman across the mountains in 1836, showing at once the practicability of a wagon road from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But the wagon seemed hardly less wonderful than the patient women in it. Rough mountaineers who had come to the rendezvous of the American Fur Company just westward of the "divide" were dumbfounded at the sight of the first white women on whom they had laid eyes since they had reached the States; tears came to the eyes of some of them as they shook hands with the first white women that ever crossed the Rocky Mountains; Mrs. Spaulding had been very ill, and the rough devotion of these men and their Indian wives gave her new hope and courage for the work. On the other hand, "From that day," one of these men said, "I was a better man." But it was for an old trapper to see the real national significance of the advent of these women into that far-flung country. "There," he said, pointing to the women, "is something which the honorable Hudson Bay Company cannot get rid of. They cannot send these women out of the country. They had come to stay."