Also, this is the only time in history when a government has so complimented the objects of a Memorial Association, as to authorize so large a number as six million coins, to commemorate the heroism of the fathers and mothers who traversed the Oregon Trail to the Far West with great hardship, daring and loss of life, which not only resulted in adding new states to the Union but earned a well-deserved and imperishable fame for the pioneers; to honor the twenty thousand dead that lie buried in unknown graves along the two thousand miles of that great highway of history; to rescue the various important points along the trail from oblivion; and to commemorate by suitable monuments, memorial and otherwise, the tragic events associated with that emigration—erecting them along the trail or elsewhere, in localities appropriate for the purpose, including the city of Washington.
The bill authorizing the Oregon Trail Memorial Coin passed both House and Senate by unanimous vote, an incident also unique in our history. The places to be specially marked, in order of their importance, are Old Fort Hall, Whitman Mission, Fort Laramie and numerous other spots, with a monument to the Pioneers in the capital city of Washington.
Idaho's special interest is the erection of the Old Fort Hall Monument which the Idaho Unit of the Oregon Trail Memorial Association has unanimously voted should be upon the site of the historic old Fort which was a place of Destiny, instead of several miles from it, as advocated by some of the eastern members of the Association. The Idaho Unit of the Association feels that a monument a few miles from the spot, on the roadside with a "tablet pointing the way," would be really a monument to our present-day commercialism, instead of to "Fort Hall, the place where the Lord worked."
Founded by force of circumstance by the American, Nathaniel Wyeth, in 1834, Fort Hall was the means of bringing the Great American Migration to the Oregon Country and to California, it being a half-way place that Americans would reach and then go beyond. From it, trails radiated in five directions. Lost by Wyeth to the British interests in 1836, it was the site of clash of wits and wills between Hudson's Bay Company and Americans, to prevent American entrance into the Oregon Country by forcing abandonment of wagons at this point. When Whitman's "two hundred wagon train" succeeded in passing this place in 1843, thereby proving that Americans could reach the Columbia by wagon, it was the point where Hudson's Bay made every effort to divert Americans to California, then to Mexican territory, as depicted in
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