Oregon.

The Oregon Trail was the pathway for Fremont in 1842, perhaps the
most overvalued explorer of all the West; albeit this comment may
to some seem harsh. Kit Carson and Bill Williams led Fremont
across the Rockies almost by the hand. Carson and Williams
themselves had been taken across by the Indian tribes. But
Fremont could write; and the story which he set down of his first
expedition inflamed the zeal of all. Men began to head out for
that far-away country beyond the Rockies. Not a few scattered
bands, but very many, passed up the valley of the Platte. There
began a tremendous trek of thousands of men who wanted homes
somewhere out beyond the frontier. And that was more than ten
years before the Civil War. The cow trade was not dreamed of; the
coming cow country was overleaped and ignored.

Our national horizon extended immeasurably along that dusty way.
In the use of the Oregon Trail we first began to be great. The
chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not
the long-haired, fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but
the gaunt and sadfaced woman sitting on the front seat of the
wagon, following her lord where he might lead, her face hidden in
the same ragged sunbonnet which had crossed the Appalachians and
the Missouri long before. That was America, my brethren! There
was the seed of America's wealth. There was the great romance of
all America--the woman in the sunbonnet; and not, after all, the
hero with the rifle across his saddle horn. Who has written her
story? Who has painted her picture?

They were large days, those of the great Oregon Trail, not always