Greeley's advice was never sounder than to-day; revised, it should read: "Come West, young man, and help the country grow."
The start has just been made. Perhaps the days of strident booms are over (let us trust so), and it may be that the bonanza opportunities are for the most part buried in the past, together with the first advent of the railroads, the discoveries of gold, and the exploitation of agriculture, which gave them birth. But the West is getting her second wind. The greater development is yet to come; the Panama Canal, with quickened immigration, manufacturing, and a more thorough-going cultivation of resources than ever in the past, spell that. What has gone before is trivial and inconsequential in comparison with what is to come. Pioneering is along different lines than in the old days, but it still is pioneering, and the call of it is as insistent for ears properly tuned.
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of cities yet to be,
The first low wash of waves where soon
Will roll a human sea.
The waves have wet the shores, but their true advance has scarce begun.
CHAPTER II
The Valley of Content
REGON—the old Oregon Territory of yesterday and the State of to-day—is our very own. It was neither bought, borrowed, nor stolen from another nation. It is of the United States because our fathers came here first, carved out homes from the wilderness, and unfurled their flag overhead; through the most fundamental of rights—that of discovery, coupled with possession and development.