to it; and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of
the frontier, nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. A new
people now was in process of formation--a people born of a new
environment. America and the American were conceiving. There was
soon to be born, soon swiftly to grow, a new and lasting type of
man. Man changes an environment only by bringing into it new or
better transportation. Environment changes man. Here in the
midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways of
the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of
our land.

The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the
wagon-trains went out hundreds strong, were not the same as the
scattering cavalcade of the fur hunters, not the same as the
ox-trains and mule-trains of the Santa Fe traffic. The men who
wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon Trail were neither
trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men--the first real
emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond the
Rockies.

The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur
trade. Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in
the thirties. The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it
only after crossing the Rockies. But, before gold in California
was dreamed of, there had come back to the States reports of
lands rich in resources other than gold, lying in the far
Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before the
Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men
with their families, men with their household goods, were
steadily passing out for the far-off and unknown country of