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Collection: Books and Periodicals
Three Years in California by John D. Borthwick (1857)(LoC) (423 pages)
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Page: of 423
EMIGRATION FROM
sengers, while numbers went by the different routes
through Mexico, and others chose the easier, but
more tedious, passage round Cape Horn.
The emigration from the Western States was
naturally very large, the inhabitants being a class
of men whose lives are spent in clearing the wild
forests of the West, and gradually driving the Indian
from his hunting-ground.
Of these western-frontier men it is often said,
that they are never satisfied if there is any white
man between them and sundown. They are constantly moving westward ; for as the wild Indian is
forced to retire before them, so they, in their turn,
shrinking from the signs of civilisation which their
own labours cause to appear around them, have to
plunge deeper into the forest, in search of that wild
border-life which has such charms for all who have
ever experienced it.
To men of this sort, the accounts of sucha country
as California, thousands of miles to the westward of
them, were peculiarly attractive ; and so great was the
emigration, that many parts of the Western States
were nearly depopulated. The route followed by
these people was that overland, across the plains,
which was the most congenial to their tastes, and the
most convenient for them, as, besides being already so
far to the westward, they were also provided with the
necessary waggons and oxen for the journey. For
the sake of mutual protection against the Indians,
they travelled in trains of a dozen or more waggons,