The Old Overland Trail from the Missouri River to the Willamette is a distance of nearly two thousand miles. Before Jason Lee and Marcus Whitman sanctioned its use for the migrating myriads of Americans seeking the shores of the sunset sea, trappers and adventurers, good and bad, had mapped out a general route over the wind-whipped passes, where the storm stands sentinel and guards the granite ways among the rough Rocky Mountains. They had followed the falls-filled Snake and the calmer Columbia, which plow for a thousand miles or more among basaltic bastions buttressing the mountain sides, or through the lava lands where cavernous chasms yawn and abysmal depths echo back the sullen roar of the raging rapids. In the early forties of the nineteenth century restless spirits from Missouri and eastward began to filter through the fingertips of the beckoning mountains of the West and locate in the land where storms seldom come and where the extremes of heat and cold are unknown--Willamette Valley, Oregon. In these early days, a farmer, whom we shall name Johnson, with wife and son, hoping to better conditions and prolong life, thus sought the goal toward the setting sun. Starting when the sturdy spring was enlivening all nature, they left the malarial marshes of the Mississippi Valley, where quinine and whisky for "fevernagur" were to be had at every crossroads store, and in a couple of weeks found themselves west of the muddy Missouri, where the herds of humped bison grazed as yet unafraid among the rolling, well-wooded hills of eastern Kansas. Barring a few common hindrances, they went well and reached the higher and hotter plains in midsummer; they were out of the sight of hills and trees--just one weary, eternal, unchangeable vista day after day. Mrs. Johnson had not been well, and after a few weeks that promised more for the future than they fulfilled, she began gradually to lose strength. But she was made of the uncomplaining material pioneers are wrought of, the ones who so lived, loved, and labored that the hard-earned sweets of civilization grew to highest perfection about their graves, and proved the most enduring monument to their memory. She never murmured other than to ask occasionally: "Father, how much farther? Isn't it a wonderfully long way to Oregon?" "Just over that next range of hills, I think, from what the trappers told me," was the reply, after they had come to the toes of the foothills that terminate the long-lying limbs of the giant Rockies. But he did not know the stealth of the mountains nor the fantastic pranks the cañony ranges can play upon the stranger. A snowy-haired peak, brother to Father Time, wearing a fringe of evergreens for his neckruff, would play hide-and-seek with them for days, dodging behind this eminence and hiding away back of that hill, only to reappear apparently as far off as ever, and sometimes in a different direction from where he last seemed to be.