True, men had abundant opportunity to "move "without crossing the western mountains. They might go from Ohio to Michigan, Wisconsin, or Iowa; from Kentucky to western Missouri, Arkansas, or Texas. But, while thousands were each year doing this, such migrations after all were hardly satisfying to those remembering the deeds of pioneer ancestors who had traversed the "Wilderness Road "into Kentucky, and settled in a wild region amid constant dangers and alarms from hostile savages. The stories of Boone, Kenton, Clark, and scores of others were still recited around frontier firesides by old men and women who spoke out of their own vivid recollections of these border heroes. Such tales fired the imaginations of the young, and prepared a generation of men for a new feat of pioneering, more arduous in some respects than that of seventy years before. But it was an alluring prospect, this journey of two thousand miles through an uninhabited wilderness. The combination of vast plains, great rivers and mountains enticed the dweller in the peaceful, but unpoetic valleys of the interior, while the vision of a farm directly tributary to the western ocean seemed to him to promise a larger measure of economic bliss than he could hope to achieve at home.
Add to all this the belief, which many held, that their going to Oregon would benefit the United States in its contest with Great Britain over territorial rights, and we have a combination of motives powerful enough to set hundreds of pioneers in motion.
