through these migrations at the same time that the participants were translating their lives to a new sphere. For engaging and vivid detail of experiences in this movement, recourse must be had .to the transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, and to journals kept on the way across the plains. These will ever have an interest for the heart of man as they show life under heroic impulse and in trying conditions long sustained. The whole movement Oregonward has an epic unity, and when its significance has become fully manifest will challenge the powers of the national poet.
But the movement has not yet, even in its outward aspects, been viewed as a whole. To mark off its limits in time, in routes taken, in numbers and population elements involved; to note the main motives, the forms of characteristic experiences; in a word to make, as it were, a composite view with relation to national history as a background, would seem to be the first step for realizing the due appreciation of the significance of the work of the Oregon pioneers. A sketch of the outlines of the movement in its more salient features, then, is what is attempted here, with the hope that such setting forth of the movement as a whole, with outlines more or less closely defined, will lead to its being brought fully into relation with the general course of events of American history. Until the story of the Oregon movement is thus set forth, the historians of our national life cannot weave it into its proper conspicuous relations in their narratives. It has no doubt been largely due to this lack if the story of this pioneer achievement in available form that a somewhat undue estimate of Doctor Whitman's services and the acceptance of mythical accretions to them have come about. The Whitman story was early available and was made to do service in accounting for a larger outcome than facts warranted.
