On June 6th, 1896 George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen departed from New York's Battery in an 18 foot rowboat destination Europe.  They took the northern route skirting in and out of the shipping lanes.  The same shipping passages that the Titanic would later use and the same areas fished by Gloucester and Nova Scotia fisherman.

The starting signal will be given at noon from the offices of the Matin. All our nervous anxiety has disappeared, all the difficulties have vanished. At least the difficulties are still serious, but our minds have cast aside all doubt. We shall not think of to-morrow, of the future ; we shall simply go ahead.

Joseph Schafer was Oregon's first academically trained, professional historian, serving on the faculty of the University of Oregon for twenty years. While in Eugene, he wrote what became a classic textbook on Pacific Northwest history. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner’s at the University of Wisconsin, Schafer remained a defender of Turner's famous "frontier thesis" of American history—which ascribed the nation's profoundly democratic, innovative, and individualistic tendencies to the frontier experience—long after many historians had turned against it.