In the days of the early Oregon pioneers the narrative of Lewis and Clark’s explorations to the Pacific Coast had become little more than a tradition to the frontier people of the West. The wild stories of mountain trappers, told by camp fires, and colored by vivid recollections of real privations among mountain defiles—these formed the picture in the popular mind along the frontier of the difficulties to be overcome in a journey across the Rockies. As long as these reiterated stories took their measure of endurance from the wanderings of missionaries and mountain trappers, the problem of their influence might be a simple one; but when the question of taking women and children over the dreary wastes of wide deserts and pathless steeps of mountain cliffs was raised, other considerations were at once added; for how could these trusts be transported over bridgeless and fordless streams? How insured against hunger and thirst, and how kept out of reach of the danger of attack by hostile tribes of Indians? The object of this brief paper is to outline a conviction of the writer that the difficulties in the way of a migration to Oregon—as these difficulties were seen by the people of the frontier states—formed a selecting test of the kind of people who alone could go to Oregon across the mountains in those days—a real and practical natural selection of a new people for a new community. Without entering into the hackneyed question of the agency of Doctor Whitman in securing Oregon for the United States, we may say Doctor Whitman was no mythical character. He was a real man; a missionary of the American Board. In 1842 he found the Indians around him so dissatisfied, that he called a synodical meeting of the neighboring missions, and submitted to them the question “Shall we give up the mission of Waiilatpu?” The synod decided in the negative. The doctor then said to his co-laborers, “Then you must vote me leave of absence, for I must go home to confer with the board on the situation.” In fact Doctor Whitman seems to have had a mild kind of monomania on the subject of ox teams drawing plain Missouri wagons from Fort Independence to the Columbia at Wallula. Anyway, his brethren of that synod all knew that he carried that conviction with him to the states. They knew, too, that he wanted an opportunity to publish it along the frontiers to the restless multitude who were asking the question, “Was it safe to attempt to take a family to Oregon in an ox wagon?” Doctor Whitman said he knew this could be done; said he himself would guide a train of wagons to Wallula, on the Columbia, and reach there before the fall storms should hinder their progress.