LET 'ER BUCK 



Many of these youngsters doubtless met up with 

 some old hands, and were initiated into an interest in 

 the West. Thus the ancestral urge of adventure 

 strengthened the trade relationship of industrial Mas- 

 sachusetts with the agricultural West, which began 

 when Captain Gray sailed out of Boston harbor to 

 trade a chisel for otter skins with the Indians on the 

 Columbia. So we see an unbroken and very close re- 

 lationship between Massachusetts and the Northwest 

 and between her sons and those of Washington and 

 Oregon. 



There was a time but a few years ago when the call 

 of the wild made such an appeal to many of the East- 

 ern college men that cow-punching became almost a 

 mania. There was almost an epidemic of reversion 

 to type. Cultivated youth, fascinated by the free open 

 life of the far West, obeyed Horace Greeley's injunc- 

 tion and went there. If he was not too much of a 

 "dude," he survived his dancing lessons to the tune 

 of a six-shooter, his saddle soreness, chuckwagon 

 dodgers, wet, cold, heat, isolation, deserts, swollen tor- 

 rents, swollen lips, sometimes swollen eyes, horns, 

 hoofs, rope-burns and rattlesnakes, and became a man. 



Many of these Easterners assimilated rapidly the 

 contagious life and spirit of the West, for after all 

 they had only skipped a generation — it's only one gen- 

 eration from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves. They contrib- 

 uted to the West the culture and breadth of viewpoint 

 which this reciprocal intermingling helped to create, 

 emancipating the West from many prejudices and 

 localisms and helped to bring about that superb bal- 

 ance which characterizes the average Westerner of to- 

 day. 



From the intermingling of these types, particularly 



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