By the time the last great log that barred the pass was reached, a long string of wagons stood waiting its removal. While the long saws were plied, and then the levers brought, all stood in expectation; willing hands lent their eager aid: the great wooden mass rolled sullenly away, and the tide of settlement poured through the gap. Between that day in 1867 and 1880 upward of five thousand wagons have made the journey, and, to the honor of the original locators be it said, all without accident arising from the road.
The first few years all went merry as a marriage-bell. The road naturally followed the fertile valleys; and small blame to the road-makers if, having the whole country before them, they chose the smoothest and cheapest route. No man will climb a hill and cut his way along its side if he can find good level ground at the bottom.
The road-makers were entitled under their congressional grant to alternate mile-square sections in a wide belt on either side of their road; the intervening sections were, of course, opened to settlement by the construction of the road. The open-valley sections were soon seized on, and a band of settlements justified, even so soon, the principle of the road-grant.
But to many men in this world, and Oregon has her share, the descriptive motto is not, "Labor is sweet, and we have toiled," but the antithesis, "Other men have labored: let us enter into the fruits of their labor." So squatters entered with the legitimate settler, or close on his heels, and took possession of many a section of the road company's land, "taking the chances," as they would express it, of something happening to help them to hold. To aid matters, these men fenced across the road near their houses, and carried the road round on the hill-sides above their farms. The settlers were not slow to follow so promising an example, and, to have the benefit of the bottom-land through which the road ran, they also pushed the road away up the hills.
On more than one occasion the road company sent and had these fences removed and opened the original road afresh. But travelers did not aid them; for here came in a trait of American character I have often noticed, namely, unwillingness to insist on strict right against their neighbors, and a readiness to make any shift, or agree to and use any _détour_, when to keep the old, straight road would involve a question. So the valley road got disused in places, and travel went round by the hills.
