the continual effort necessary there to keep at all abreast of the incessant struggle against the savagery of its surroundings. The long frontier line west of the Mississippi in the early forties was aglow with a restless people pressing westward, and but recently come there. The usual causes of extreme poverty had not settled there; and so it came that few indeed along this border line could be classed as dependent poor. And, perhaps, none too poor to own a team and a good serviceable farm wagon, with means sufficient to provision it with good wholesome food and clothing for a journey to Oregon. But, if such there happened to be, we can easily imagine the dismay it must have caused to have the name of such a man proposed as a member of one of these companies. The fact, doubtless, was that the unfitness of such a proposal prevented its occurrence.
The poor the dependent poor were not in the movement to Oregon. These organized wagon companies, however well meaning, however generous they might be as individuals, had no place in their organizations for the dependent poor man. Yet one more of these causes of unfitness for such a journey as the one we have been trying to picture, was that of chronic feeble health. To start on such a difficult and dangerous expedition as this unquestionably was during the proper pioneer family movement, from 1842 to 1852, would have seemed to all concerned too much like suicide of the sick or the chronically feeble.
The expedition to Oregon, as they looked upon it, called for a power of endurance that might be found only in the soundest. So by common consent poor health ruled its possessor from the ranks of the pioneers. One can readily see what must have been the result of this exclusion upon the health condition of
