author:Howard McKinley Corning

“ It is this story of development that is told in Willamette Landings. Here is the record of the boisterous and yet bucolic years of river traffic. And of course the story ends with the construction of railways and roads, over which produce and people could move swiftly and more directly. And so the old landings were left to fall into decay or to be carried away by the freshets.
The historian always finds it an adventure to come upon a good study, such as this, in some comparatively new field. ”

“ This method of settlement and this way of life were so striking that in the final decades of the Eighteenth century and the first decades of the Nineteenth century, the men of the migration into the interior of the continent were known as the "Men of the Western Waters." ”

“ It was toward the end of this period of river greatness—but still in that period—that the westernmost of the pioneers began moving from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast; specifically, so far as most of the farmers were concerned, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. During the 1840's, their wagon wheels dug the ruts of the Oregon Trail. In the latter years of that decade there was the California gold rush to deepen those ruts. And all through the 1850's, and after, the wagons rolled on and the ruts worked farther into the hard plain and the harder mountains. ”