Advanced evolutionists include with their scientific shibboleth, "the survival of the fittest," an ethical element, when applied to civilized society. The early settlements here were singularly free from transgressors. There was no criminal code and no courts of law up to the time of the provisional government. Every man was a law unto himself, and it is said there was no offense against person or property of sufficient importance to require them. These were halcyon days, often referred to by old Oregonians, who say that crime and criminals were unknown until society was put under the tantalizing reign of law. I have heard not a few, in referring to the good old times, express the opinion that mankind are governed too much by statute and thereby released, in a great degree, from moral restraint.
There is occasionally an old settler so impressed with pioneer equality, fraternity, and purity, that he lays all subsequent social disturbance to the provoking interference of legal machinery with natural rights, and he longs "for a lodge in some vast wilderness" where he can end his days in peace, away from penalties and penal institutions and the temptations which civil government offers to the predatory instincts of men.
Such logical metonomy is not mentioned here except to show that the pioneers were lovers of peace and good order, and fully subject to enlightened moral restraint. As before mentioned, they were peculiar in one respect, that is, in the possession of a large share of the executive or heroic qualities.
The Great American Desert, with its sand stretches, waterless wastes, unbridged rivers, Rocky Mountains, and predatory savages, loomed up deterrently to the spiritless. A four to six months' journey in wagons, exposed to all the vicissitudes of travel and climate and the forays of more dreadful foes, ever on the alert to dispossess travelers of their only means of conveyance, was not to be considered a pleasure trip.
No doubt that to a certain but undefinable extent and in numerous ways, the circumstances and incidents to be expected on the overland journey were selective, and yet the Oregon Pioneer, as pictured by his eulogists, is rather a fanciful personage. Not that the incidents from which the picture is drawn are to any unusual degree false, but that there is too much of the commonplace left out, and so the typical pioneer, like the typical Yankee, is a caricature. The pioneers, as a body, were only a little different from those who were too affectionate or diffident to start, and among them were all sorts of people; but looking only to those who endured extraordinary privations, to those who developed an uncommon degree of strength, courage, and virtue, there have grown up the poetry and romance of the pioneers, and to none is this more evident than the pioneers themselves. At one of their annual gatherings, when an eloquent speaker was narrating the trying incidents of the overland journey, one of the earlier immigrants inquisitively remarked "I wonder if I ever crossed the plains?" I was querying the same; still we must not neglect to state that the speaker was dealing in facts. He was leaving out so much that those who had passed the ordeal wondered if they had ever been there. Indeed, the speakers and writers who have been called to the task of perpetuating pioneer history have had the usual inducements to false coloring, which has been the curse of all history in all times.
Striking incidents, battles, sieges, marches, insurrections, revolutions, and the leading actors in them, of such is the warp and woof of history, until man is understood to be a mere fighting animal, although the greater part of his life has been spent in peaceful avocations and the greater exertion of his force and faculties has been devoted to constructive industry.
Out of such partiality has inevitably grown the great man theory of human progression. The student of history passes along from point to point in the bloody trail of the historian, stopping at such characters as Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, etc., until these great destroyers are looked upon as the prime factors of the evolutionary state. Of course, these and such as these must not be ignored or left out, for history would cease to be history without them, but it is equally important to know that man, judged only by them, ceases to be man. Of late an improved philosophy of history assigns them their proper place and significance as an index of evolution, and gives us the hopeful sign that notwithstanding the occasional irruption of man's destructive faculties, his progress is principally due to the subordination of the militant spirit. And now, while the principal part of our early history, territorial and state, is devoted to our really insignificant Indian wars and the principal characters on both sides, it is well enough to think that the greater constructive works of peace have been going forward with hardly a halt, and the more sober tints are yet to be given the picture of early Oregon times.
With such coloring as we now have of pioneer life and the passage of the great plains, posterity will wonder, as did the pioneer before quoted, if the pioneers ever did cross, and also what kind of people they must have been to undertake, with such slender means, so perilous a journey. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon's first delegate under the Territorial Government, advertised his constituents as "fellows who could whip their weight in wildcats," very good electioneering taffy, no doubt, but rather strong and really degrading language to apply to the earnest men and women who so patiently toiled to the Northwest coast.
Of a higher type and tone was the poetical exaggeration "only the brave started, only the strong got through." The facts are different. Some arrant cowards and many more physically weak persons, by some sufficient means, found their way here. The emigrant train was not a forlorn hope; no such test was made for membership. Neither was it a test of patriotism; albeit every citizen is a quixotic propagator of his republican faith. Various were the inducements in the minds of those who left the older states for the Pacific Slope. Many, like ex-Senator Nesmith, did not really know, as they had no well defined purpose, but might answer in his language, and with probable truth, that they were "impelled by a vague spirit of adventure." Restless spirits are always ready for any move, promising unusual scope for the exercise of their faculties. Many were along to enjoy the exhilaration of travel, in a new, strange, and truly wonderful country. Many, long wasted by the miasmatic fevers of the overrich and productive Mississippi Valley, sought immunity in the untainted mountain air of the Far West. A few of the Daniel Boone stripe were too much crowded where inhabitants exceeded one to the square mile, and took one more move with the hope that the hum drum of civilization would never overtake them. A few of a poetical turn of mind, tired of the monotony of the greater East, sought fresh inspiration and a home upon the picturesque shores of the sunset seas.
But while all of the foregoing and many other inducements might have been present in varying degree, the great incentive to immigration was free land. Not only land for the landless, but land for all, and in unstinted quantity. The scenes at Oklahoma divest the emigration to Oregon of all mystery, and while there was probably small difference in kind or degree of virtue between those who came and those who remained, of one fact pioneers are cognizant, namely, that the incidents and trials of the overland journey were a wonderful developer and equalizer. The fictitious gloss of so-called society was abraded, and the shams of character in which human beings had invested themselves, like weakly oxen, were left on the road. Everywhere this is observable, and it is often remarked that the true pioneer is never afterward subject to an undue self-inflation. It seems as though a few months' practice of sincere brotherhood is fatal to an offensive amount of arrogance and egotism.