Chapter II: Foreword: Ezra Meeker, the Author

A LIFE SPAN OF MORE THAN NINETY-FIVE YEARS FROM THE
ADMINISTRATION OF ANDREW JACKSON TO THE
PRESIDENCY OF CALVIN COOLIDGE

By ROBERT BRUCE

Ezra Meeker was born December 29, 1830, about ten miles east of Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio, while Andrew Jackson was President of the United States, John C. Calhoun, Vice President, and Martin Van Buren, Secretary of State. There had been only six Presidents--Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams; and the last three were still living. Considerable numbers could remember listening to the Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia or elsewhere; a trifle less than half a century had elapsed since the decisive victory at Yorktown, and survivors among men who served in the armies of the Revolution were younger than the average of Civil War veterans in 1926.

Although we are accustomed to think, read and speak of the Oregon Trail as "old," the route to which that name has since been given did not come into existence until several years after Mr. Meeker was born. So the shadow thrown upon the screen of time by the living figure of this remarkable man is longer than we may say figuratively is cast by the highway itself; and while the latter has been gradually passing into the background of history and romance, he is still carrying forward with singleness of purpose and unabated energy what will probably be left to posterity as the most important work of his whole busy life.

Prior to 1830, neither the people east of the Mississippi nor the Government at Washington had adequate conceptions of the geographical, political or future commercial importance of the Pacific Northwest; and the wonderful developments there in the last seven decades have grown out of the overland migration of the 40s and 50s, or at least owe much to it, historically and practically.

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A most appropriate symbol of the "Course of Empire" from the valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri to the Columbia River and Puget Sound country would be a miniature wagon--sometimes idealized as a "prairie schooner"--carrying many thousands of home seekers into what now comprises all of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with contiguous parts of Wyoming and Montana. Except for that great human movement, of which the author of this Romance is the only survivor among the men who went over the Trail with their own outfits in 1852, that region would have continued primarily a fur-hunting territory for many years later than was actually the case, and then in all probability have become a part of the British Dominions in America.

As a youth, Ezra Meeker saw recruits somewhat older than himself leave for the Mexican War; he was intensely interested in reports about the far-away and then almost legendary Oregon Country before there was any established travel to it, and heard echoes of the discovery of gold in California--though he was not, as frequently stated, a "Forty-Niner." Accounts of opening the Panama Railroad in 1855, with its considerable effect upon the subsequent emigration to the Pacific Coast, and of the Crimean War, reached the family cabin built with his own hands in "Old" Oregon. Mr. Meeker is now the only one left from the adults residing in Washington Territory when it was created in 1853.

For more than fifty years he was a farmer and hop grower in the Puget Sound region, meanwhile spending four winters introducing hops from Washington and Oregon in the European market; and was also at one time a prospector and miner in the Yukon. Within the span of his life the population of the United States has increased from less than Thirteen Millions, then living mostly along the Atlantic seaboard, to about a Hundred and Fifteen Millions occupying the whole country to the western ocean. So far as we have been able to ascertain, Mr. Meeker is the only person who ever undertook an important work of fiction in his 95th year; and this has been done to revive and preserve the experiences and memories of his youth, in connection with the efforts of two decades to mark the Trail and honor the Pioneers.

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