Data for determining the numbers that came across the plains to Oregon during the successive years are as yet very unsatisfactory. The estimates given below for 1842 and 1843 are well founded, but the others, especially from 1847 on, are from no very tangible basis. At the close of 1841 the Americans in Oregon numbered possibly four hundred.
The above figures are taken quite closely from those given by Elwood Evans in his address before the Pioneer Association in 1877. I make the immigration of 1844, however, seven hundred, instead of four hundred and seventy-five, as he gives it.
No doubt this one summer on the plains was an ordeal under which some sensitive natures were strained and weakened for life. It may be, too, that living for five or six months, as families, on the simplest, barest necessities of life, fixed standards of living lower than they otherwise would have been. The effect, however, on strong, resourceful natures of these months on the plains could not have been other than salutary. The pioneers, when they started, were most distinctively American in their characteristics. As such they needed to be socialized. No better school could have been devised than the organization and regimen of the trip across the plains for socializing their natures.
