The Dream and Glory of Conquest 283 
strangely dramatic, as also sublimely pathetic, in the strange 
scene of hundreds of men, with their wives and little ones, bid- 
ding farewell to friends, to home, to civilization, and starting 
on a journey with ox-teams a distance of 3,000 miles across 
a trackless waste, and over rugged, unexplored mountains, the 
way obstructed by numberless bridgeless rivers, yawning, deso- 
late canyons and parched repellent deserts, with a view of estab- 
lishing new homes amid all the perils incident to a wilderness 
inhabited only by savage men and beasts. Many of these brave 
men and women never lived to reach their destination, but fell 
by the wayside, like Hervey’s ships, “that sailed for sunny 
isles, but never came to shore.” But, leaving the lonely grave 
of the loved one in the desert, the body soon to be devoured by 
the hungry wolf of the plain, the brave column of survivors, 
sustained by Wordsworth’s “ amaranthine flower of faith,” and, 
in the language of Milton, “ finding new hope springing out of de- 
spair,’ moved on and on, and although, in the words of Southey, 
“no station is in view nor palm grove islanded amid the waste,” 
they still press on and on, over burning deserts and trackless 
mountain steeps, until at last they rest in the cooling shades of 
“the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon.” 
As a factor in the civilization of America and of the age in 
which we live, Oregon as a state challenges attention. Civiliza- 
tion over two hundred years ago marshalled its battalions and 
took up its line of march in the Orient. Gathering strength 
with the steady advance of its conquering column, the tread of 
its victorious legions among the mountains and over the plains 
of the distant west signaled the rapid approach of the builders 
of empire; and though beauteous in its infancy, grand in the 
clear light of the Orient in the early morn of its existence, may 
we not expect that the state of Oregon will realize its grandest 
achievements amid the glories of accumulated splendor in the 
distant Occident ? 
It was truly a grand conception, a sublime thought, inspired 
by an almost supernatural prescience on the part of Coleridge 
when, more than half a century ago, he in his “ Table Talk” gave 
utterance to this sentence : 
“The possible destiny of the United States of America, as a nation of 
an hundred million of freemen, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
living under the laws of Alfred and speaking the language of Shakes- 
peare and Milton, is an august conception. 
