lished by the contact of the new forces, introduced by man, with the forces of nature found here, yet hitherto unused. This contact with primitive nature, experienced by the pioneers, produced an exaltation of the spirits that cannot now be repeated nor imagined. It was a situation in contact with the freshness of nature, wherein being was bliss. It belongs to memory, and never can be realized again.
Unrelated opinions of all sorts grew rank and ran wild in this situation. They were uncorrected by influence of the outer world. It is this fact that made older Oregon what it was, and makes it so difficult to correct or to modify the ideas established then. Through active communication with the larger world, the change is coming now, but still it is extremely difficult to move the Oregon people of the olden time out of their ways of thought and action. There is a solid opposition that may not seem to resist, yet is practically immovable. Hence new methods of industry and culture gain but slowly. Yet they are making sure progress.
The political opinions, social usages and industrial methods of the early time conformed strictly to the conditions that pertained or belonged to such situation. Everything was a spontaneous outgrowth; but nature ruled over all. Social life was free and easy, where there were no classes, and no social gradations. Opinions on religious and social questions were cast in very much the same mould, all about us; and independence of thought and action, on such subjects, was almost unknown. Only on political questions was real difference of opinion asserted. This difference came on the one side from our Northern people; on the other from our Southern settlers. The Kansas-Nebraska struggle in politics was fought in Oregon as in Massachusetts and Missouri—even though we were at a continental distance from the scene of conflict.
Except in the Puget Sound region, the Indians in the Oregon country never were so numerous as they had been in some other parts of our American territory; nor were they at all an agricultural class. They lived on game and fish and the wild
