The writer remembers vividly that part of the road in 1852. A lad of eight years, in common with the women and other children of the party, he trudged afoot along many weary miles of this road, up and down many long and, to his mind, interminable hills, through the biting frost of early morn and the torrid heat of midday, and he can testify to its roughness and manifold difficulties. Against Prof. Schafer's comment I wish to protest most emphatically. Mr. Wilkes was a man of high ideals, of lofty public spirit. It was impossible for him to "deliberately deceive" anyone. To attempt deceit carries with it unworthy or dishonest motives. A reader of Wilkes' writings, his books, pamphlets and newspapers, will find an entire absence of selfishness or wish for private gain or personal aggrandizement at the expense of anyone. One writer has described the style of the book as "flamboyant," which is doubtless true, but greater faults than this can readily be forgiven one not more than twenty-seven years of age who devotes his splendid talents, his time and his money to the exploitation of a colossal national improvement that for the period of seventy years ago was of infinitely more importance to the United States, and especially to the Pacific Coast, than the Panama Canal of today. By most people his proposal was thought more impossible of achievement than today would be an effort to establish a line of airships between the earth and the moon. He was a little more than twenty years in advance of his time. The first transcontinental line was completed in 1869 and the scandals that followed its construction served to prove Wilkes' contention about the unwisdom of subsidizing railroads by land grants or money and still permitting private ownership of them. Particular importance attaches to this book for another reason. The migration of 1843, consisting of about 900 men, women and children, who brought with them large numbers of horses and cattle, fruit trees, etc., was the first large one. It strengthened the hands of the men who had at all times demanded that the claims of Great Britain to any part of Old Oregon south of latitude 49 degrees should be resisted at all hazards, by force of arms if necessary. The speeches of Linn, Benton, Calhoun, Webster, Clay and nearly all the notable men of the period between 1819 and 1846 show a surprising knowledge of the soil, climate, productions of land and water, its commercial advantages and all the varied details of the grazing and agricultural possibilities of Old Oregon. The record shows that these matters were familiar to these great men before an American missionary or American settler had reached Oregon.