At the Raft River was another point of great interest; for here turned aside the arm of the transcontinental trail that led to California. This fork of the road was thirteen hundred and thirty-four miles from the Missouri.[42] Working as best it might from the Raft River, down the Great Snake valley, touching and crossing and paralleling several different streams, the trail ran until it reached the Grande Ronde valley, at the eastern edge of the difficult Blue Mountains, and seventeen hundred and thirty-six miles from the starting point. The railway to-day crosses the Blues where the old trail did. Then the route struck the Umatilla, and shortly thereafter the mighty Columbia, the "Oregon" of the poet, and a stream concerning which we were not always so placid as we are to-day. It was nineteen hundred and thirty-four miles to the Dalles, nineteen hundred and seventy-seven miles to the Cascades, two thousand and twenty miles to Fort Vancouver, and twenty-one hundred and thirty-four miles to the mouth of the Columbia; though the trail proper terminated at Fort Vancouver--the same post, as we shall see, for which the hero Jedediah Smith headed when he was in such dire distress, in the mountains of southwest Oregon.[43]
This was the way to the Pacific, the trail across the Rockies, the appointed path of the heroes that ventured forth into the unknown lands, as well as of the men that followed them safely in later days. It was but a continuation of the way to the Missouri, of the way across the Alleghanies, a part of the path of the strange appointed pilgrimage of the white race in America.
Said to have been the first white man to cross the borders of what is now Wyoming.
Pray you yet again, remember this great American date of 1834, and you shall be quit of all others, all those telling of wars and politics. That was the year when the beaver trapping ceased to be profitable, when the trappers came in, when the wild West began to become the civilized West. This date, remembered philosophically, will prove of the utmost service in retaining a connected idea of the settlement of the West. It has bearings both upon the past and upon the future. It is a milestone marking the parting of the ways.