I never saw anything more beautiful, the river winding about rough the ravines, the forests so different. The country all rough is burnt over so often there is not the least underbrush, but the grass grows thick and beautiful.
So recorded Rebecca Ketcham in 1853 as she camped in a stand of ponderosa pines on the Oregon Trail. She was one of 300,000 or more pioneers who, with "blood, sweat and muscle," trekked 2,000 miles from Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley.
What a ...