OF THE OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY. THE OREGON TRAIL. The early Oregon pioneers not only gained the first secure foothold for the American people on the Pacific Coast, but their movement opened the way to American occupation and in itself counted as an occupation of that realm for American civilization. They moved across the continent at an auspicious time, and so were able to influence, if not to shape, the course of great events touching the widening of the American dominion on the Pacific. It was all done so quietly, so efficiently, at so comparatively small cost and without any shock of harrowing disaster, that the world has yet to connect the momentous results with a cause seemingly so inadequate. As the American people come to realize that their distinctively national achievement so far, next to that of maintaining a national integrity, has been that of preempting and subduing an adequate dominion and home for a civilization they will revere the services of those who made the transcontinental migrations in the thirties, forties and fifties. The glory that belongs to the participants in those migrations is the peculiar birthright of the patriotic Oregonian. The passage from the Atlantic slope to the Pacific of these first American households bearing the best embers of western civilization must ever stand as a momentous event in the annals of time. For twenty-eight years, now, surviving participants in this world event have annually assembled to recount the incidents of their coming to Oregon, to live over that trying but hallowed time, to rekindle old flames of friendship and form new ties on the basis of their common experiences. At these meetings of the Oregon pioneers there was always an “occasional address” in which the reminiscences of the immigration of some particular year were given. As the journal of the association puts it, the object of the association “should be to collect reminiscences relating to pioneers and the early history of the territory; to promote social intercourse, and cultivate the life-enduring friendships that in many instances had been formed while making the long, perilous journey of the wide, wild plains, which separated the western boundary of civilization thirty years ago from the land which they had resolved to reclaim.” The biographical notices contained in the transactions of their association all mark this coming to Oregon as a dividing event in the lives of their subjects. That generation of Oregonians suffered something like a transfiguration through this movement, which also widened the nation’s outlook—in making it face a greater sea. These transforming influences wrought their effects during the summer season that each successive immigration spent on the Oregon trail, while journeying in canvas-topped oxen-drawn wagons from the banks of the Missouri to those of the Willamette. The greatest epochal expansion of