In Eastern Oregon, there are bright women managing large wheat ranches and business concerns. In Southern Oregon, women head many of the largest enterprises. In legislative bodies, they have won renown. As heads of large schools, they have shown splendid leadership. In business, as realtors, office managers, and as heads of large stores, women are winning recognition.
The Oregon women have a way of doing things that bespeaks determination, courage, ability and love for their work. Above all, the women of Oregon are makers of homes. Early in the history of the Oregon country, schools and colleges were established and women were active in every enterprise of a cultural nature.
Pioneer Women of the West
By Sheba Hargreaves
(Author: "The Cabin at the Trail's End")
Breaking the westward trail for the covered wagon, strong-hearted women fared forth "across the plains" with their husbands in quest of homes on the Pacific Coast. The women who established these first homes were a self-effacing type, busy with household cares and the training of large families, but they carried "the torch of civilization" with them. They were women who must have a curtain at the cabin window, a puncheon floor scoured as clean as home-made soft soap and water could make it, and a low rocking chair by the evening fireside where little children gathered at their knees to lisp their bedtime prayers. Where they lived there must be a puncheon shelf for the Bible, Webster's Blue-backed Spelling Book and McGuffy's Reader. They seldom voiced their sufferings. They asked but little; if their children could have religious and educational advantages they followed their husbands meekly enough.
The crossing was hazardous. Two thousand miles in a summer with an ox team hitched to a springless wagon! This was the prospect ahead of a wife whose husband decided to "go west" in the 1840's. Oregon then was that vast stretch of country west of the Rocky Mountains, north to the Canadian border and south to the forty-second parallel. The country was unsettled except for the Hudson Bay Company's post at Vancouver and a few French-Canadian farmers on French
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