And this was no wealthy corporation, which has but to announce its readiness to receive, and dollars are poured into its lap by a public hungry for dividends, until it has to cry, "Hold, enough!" Here were no regiments of yellow workmen, trained to labor in many a ditch and grade; but citizens of Oregon, who desired to build up their State; who believed the records of their fellows as to the miles of country that could be forced to contribute their quota of productions if but the way were opened in and out; who, having themselves prospered in the sound and moderate way in which Oregon encourages her children, were ready to risk what they had gained in a cause they knew was good--these men combined their energies to the common end. It was an enterprise which roused and maintained the kindly interest of all. The working parties in the Cascade Range were followed up by the teams of those who desired the first choice of settlement in the promised land beyond. By the time the last great log that barred the pass was reached, a long string of wagons stood waiting its removal. While the long saws were plied, and then the levers brought, all stood in expectation; willing hands lent their eager aid: the great wooden mass rolled sullenly away, and the tide of settlement poured through the gap. Between that day in 1867 and 1880 upward of five thousand wagons have made the journey, and, to the honor of the original locators be it said, all without accident arising from the road. The first few years all went merry as a marriage-bell. The road naturally followed the fertile valleys; and small blame to the road-makers if, having the whole country before them, they chose the smoothest and cheapest route. No man will climb a hill and cut his way along its side if he can find good level ground at the bottom. The road-makers were entitled under their congressional grant to alternate mile-square sections in a wide belt on either side of their road; the intervening sections were, of course, opened to settlement by the construction of the road. The open-valley sections were soon seized on, and a band of settlements justified, even so soon, the principle of the road-grant. [Sidenote: _SQUATTERS._] But to many men in this world, and Oregon has her share, the descriptive motto is not, "Labor is sweet, and we have toiled," but the antithesis, "Other men have labored: let us enter into the fruits of their labor." So squatters entered with the legitimate settler, or close on his heels, and took possession of many a section of the road company's land, "taking the chances," as they would express it, of something happening to help them to hold. To aid matters, these men fenced across the road near their houses, and carried the road round on the hill-sides above their farms. The settlers were not slow to follow so promising an example, and, to have the benefit of the bottom-land through which the road ran, they also pushed the road away up the hills.