The settlements of the blue grass region of Kentucky, and the Nashville district, in Western Tennessee, were, when first made, the most isolated from the main body of the American people. Yet, these had less than a four-hundred mile stretch between them and the settled region of the Atlantic slope. No other outward movement of Aryan people ever covered anything like the distance made by the Oregon pioneers on the Oregon trail. Measured by the sea voyage, the Oregon settlements were a leap of seventeen thousand miles. [Illustration: 2.—“LONE OR COURT HOUSE ROCK.” ] Though the Oregon pioneers traced the first trail across the continent, adapting for sections of it the lines of travel of fur trading expeditions; yet, were it not for the title of Francis Parkman’s narrative (which, however, has only the slightest references to anything pertaining to its title), I am not sure but that the very name would have been lost to all except Oregonians. The meagerness of Parkman’s presentation of the transcontinental movement is easily accounted for. He did not take his trip of roughing it to Fort Laramie and the Black Hills, in 1846, to see the Oregon pioneers. His plans to write the history of the new France in America tended to narrow his interest strictly to aspects of Indian life as they were with the Indian in his original state. He was concerned solely during his life on the plains to get that insight into Indian character and customs that he might interpret the records of the relations of the French with them, and give his narrative in his great life work truth, life, and color. Had he been inclined to associate himself with the westward moving trains, and to enter into their life and thought, his “Oregon Trail” would naturally have been a final characterization of the migrations up to the stage they had assumed at that time. There are, however, indications in some of his references to the pioneers that their necessarily _deshabille_ condition while en route, and the astounding and almost reckless character of their undertaking were by him set in contrast with the steady comfortable ways of the New England folk from which he hailed and the Oregonians correspondingly disparaged. In this he would be bringing a pioneer phase of civilization into comparison with a more finished form. The wayfaring pioneers were still marking out wider and more natural limits for the national home, while the New Englanders were advancing the arts of life on the original nucleus of national territory. But who can say to which the nation in its destiny owes the more?