the great attraction. The four or five hundred who were not dazzled with the visions of immediate wealth that beckoned southward the great army of gold-seekers, but who suffered with them the common discomforts of the way, were glad to part company at the place where their roads divided on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains.
On the Oregon part of the road no particular discouragement or distress befell the travellers until they reached The Dalles and began the passage of the mountains or the river. As no emigration had ever passed over the last ninety miles of their journey to the Willamette Valley without accident or loss, so these had their trials with floods and mountain declivities,[1] arriving, however, in good time, after having been detained in the mountains by forest fires which blocked the road with fallen timber. This was another form of the inevitable hardship which year after year fell upon travellers in some shape on this part of their journey. The fires were an evidence that the rains came later than usual, and that the former trials from this source of discomfort were thus absent.[2] Such was the general absorption of the public mind in other affairs that the immigration received little notice.
Before gold was discovered it was land that drew men to the Pacific, land seen afar off through a rosy mist which made it seem many times more valuable and beautiful than the prolific valleys of the middle and western states. And now, even before the donation law had passed, the tide had turned, and gold was the magnet more potent than acres to attract. How far population was diverted from the north-west, and to what extent California contributed to the develop-
- ↑ Gen. Smith in his report to the secretary of war said that the roads to Oregon were made to come into it, but not to go out of it, referring to the steep descents of the western declivities of the Cascade Mountains.
- ↑ A long dry autumn in 1849 was followed by freshets in the Willamette Valley in Dec. and Jan., which carried off between $40,000 and $50,000 worth of property. Or. Spectator, Jan. 10, 1850.
