Trails West and Men Who Made Them

The opening of our West is as much a part of your heritage as if you had been born within a stone’s throw of the old Oregon Trail. Coronado and Father Kino, Père Marquette and the Sieur de la Salle, Mountain Men like Jim Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick, fighting Cheyennes and fierce Dakotah Sioux, scouts like Kit Carson and Daniel Boone, frontier marshals like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp, traders like the Bents and Jesse Chisholm, emigrant wagon trains forted up against Kiowas or Blackfeet, explorers like Lewis and Clark, cowhands trailing Longhorns -- their story is your story in a very real sense. Their courage and endurance, their restless, adventurous spirit, their long hunts and lonely wanderings helped to shape us into Americans. Words like roping, claim-jumping, stogies, barbecues, cowpunchers, bullwhackers, muleskinners, and chuck-wagons sometimes bewilder our foreign visitors, but they don't bewilder us. Shout "Come and get it!" and Americans within hearing won't stop to ask what they are to come and get. They'll come and bring their appetites with them! For the terms of the old trails color our speech today just as they did a hundred years ago when the West was young.