A common carrier, responsible as such for the life and goods of these emigrants, agreed to take them from Chicago to the city of Portland, on the extreme western end of that Oregon trail, for the price per head of thirty dollars. The old “Whoa-haw” route once demanded a year of time and a heart of steel, as part of the essential capital of the traveler, and demanded also that he take his own chances and foot his own losses, which, in the nature of things, might be considerable. It was expected by one railroad in the year 1902 that it would, within the term of twelve months, carry out fifty thousand persons to settle in the Northwest coast country. There you have the old way and the new. There you have a part of the history of a country two thousand miles west of the Mississippi valley, which even Thomas Jefferson accepted as the very farthest edge of the region that could ever be called America! This is the story of a land that even Thomas Benton, a big man, and always a friend of the West, really in his own conscience thought could never, by any possibility, extend its national and civilized limits west of the Rockies! This is the record of a region which, in the beginnings of the Oregon trail, our ablest men of letters and of statecraft thought could never be aught but the home of wandering tribes of savages! Truly the great men of to-day might profitably learn humility from a study of the things which the American people have done in spite of leaders. Ah! Daniel Webster, and many other Daniels of the little East, could you come to life to-day, what would be your oratory? Francis Parkman, sometimes querulous, often supercilious, but ever beautiful and splendidly accurate historian of the beginnings of the American West, visited the Oregon trail in 1846, twelve years after Kit Carson had practically ceased to trap beaver, and four years after the first Frémont expedition.[39] He says: “Emigrants from every part of the country were preparing for the journey to Oregon and California;” and adds, “An unusual number of traders were outfitting for the Northwest;” as well as many Mormons. This was before the discovery of gold in California. Independence, the outfitting point, was at the threshold of the later West, the beginning of the way to the Pacific.[40]