Oregon Historical Society

“ A wastefulness which tends to contract free acreage beyond the convenient demands of settlement and use, is to deprive the nation of strength and elasticity. When we have no longer anything to offer the coming generations, it will be a pity if they come. The power of the great land owner over the man who has inherited nothing, and is too poor to purchase at the landlords' prices, will be, to all intents and purposes, the same which the landlords of Europe exercise over the peasant classes there. ”

“ One family spent years of happiness and contentment on a lonely sea shore, and were taught by a governess, while the play-time was spent among the beautiful groves and watching the waves so full of interest and mystery. A peaceful happy life, but in their longing for companionship they fed sugar to two house flies on the window-sill in stormy weather,—for house flies were not then a pest. ”

“ It is pleasant to remember that there was a time when one had time to be leisurely and greet one's friends in a kindly, simple fashion. Civilization was gathered within the four walls of Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River. Our greatest friend, John McLoughlin, was the chief factor of all the Hudson's Bay Company's establishments west of the Rocky Mountains, and children who have been born in the original Oregon Territory may well "rise up and call him blessed." ”

“ Elliott Coues, scientist and historian, has deprived the Historical Society of Oregon of the pleasure of making acknowledgments to the living man of its appreciation of the invaluable work he has done, touching the history of the Northwest, and particularly of Oregon, in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. ”

“ But just because the government was so rich in lands, it grew careless, speculative, even profligate. It lavished soil enough to make several states upon corporations without honor, forgetting that it was only the trustee of the people, whose consent had never directly been asked. It sold to adventurers, who never intended to make homes, immense tracts contiguous to watercourses, from which the buyers excluded citizens of the United States. ”

“ The common desire to save from invasion the country of their birth, and the necessity of captains in war, led to chieftainship, and chieftainship led to the accumulation of such wealth as the conquered lands afforded, whether in flocks and herds, in other subsistence, or in such personal property as the subjugated nation possessed. War makes a people nomadic in their habits. ”

“ In 1779, three years after the declaration of independence, and four years before the treaty of peace, the American Congress recommended to the several states in the union to make liberal cessions of their respective claims for the common benefit of the union, including the state making the cession. Thus early did our government assert the principle that the lands not held by occupancy belonged to the people for their use. The people on their side were quite willing to assist the union, burdened as it was with the debt of the revolutionary war, and other claims. ”

“ The State of Texas comprises eight and eighty-three hundredths per cent. of the area of the United States, and owns all the public lands within its borders. Thus there remains open to settlement the vacant one-third, exclusive of Alaska, Texas, and the Islands. Almost all of the vacant lands are west of the Missouri River, and include much that is of but little present value to the agriculturist from its aridity. Yet not one rod of it is valueless in the eyes of the political economist. Forests and mines are as necessary to advanced civilization as grain fields and orchards. ”

“ Thus closely joined in time, if not otherwise intimately connected, were these two measures of Jefferson's earlier administration, the Louisiana purchase and the Lewis and Clark exploration. The promptness, energy, and efficiency with which the exploration was carried out under the able and courageous leadership of the man placed in charge, were altogether worthy of its distinguished projector. ”

“ There can be no human ownership of men except that of brotherhood. The dominion of man over all other life is for his use only. He cannot claim collective ownership of any particular genus or species, but only individual ownership by conquest. Of the great divisions of inanimate nature, earth, air, and water, individual man cannot own more than he uses, because they belong equally to all men, and to all living things. For the needs of these they were created, without preference for races or single representatives of races. ”

“ Also, in case the land reserved by law on the southeast side of the Ohio River for the bounties of the Virginia troops should prove insufficient or of poor quality, then the deficiency should be made up from the lands on the northwest side of that river. All the land within the ceded territory, not reserved or appropriated to the purposes named, was to be a common fund for the use and benefit of such of the United States as had become, or should become, members of the confederation, "according to their respective proportions, in the general charge and expenditure." ”

“ The United States has supported an army to defend its citizens against savage outbreaks. Every congress appropriates large sums for the support of its Indian wards, and for their education. According to recent reports, the Indians of New Mexico cost the government, in 1897, for each pupil in the Indian schools, $167, or a lump sum of $41,750, over and above the pay of the superintendent, and other expenses. The Indian school at Salem, Oregon, for the same year, cost the treasury $50,100, and the support of the establishment, $71,700. ”

“ It will be remembered that Great Britain did not base her right to make, and to have restored to her, the Nootka settlement so much on priority in discovery of the region in which the settlement was made, as on the broader principle of her right to settle in any place by whomsoever discovered, which after a reasonable time she might find unoccupied. ”

“ By this the wonderful boy was greatly affected, and thinking that he could benefit his tribe no more, retired to the rocks above the falls, and began weeping; and, indeed, wept so copiously that his tears falling on each side of the falls wore two great holes in the solid rock, which may be seen there to this day. Finally deciding that he would no longer live as a man, the boy changed himself into a fish in order that he might rest in the quiet waters. ”

“ Meanwhile the government at Washington pressed its ministers at both courts to use every effort to secure to the United States the Floridas and New Orleans, with the Mississippi as our western boundary, and the free navigation of the river to its mouth. Events of the latter part of the year 1802, and especially the Spanish intendant's order excluding the United States from New Orleans as a place of deposit, together with France's open preparations for the occupation and colonization of New Orleans and Lower Louisiana, made the President yet more urgent in pressing for this end. ”

“ We claimed by right of discovery and first occupation, the Oregon Territory. Great Britain disputed our claim with enough show of rights to furnish some ground for the contention. Neither government was prepared to go to war over it, and for nearly thirty years after the convention of 1818 by which a joint occupancy was agreed upon, a perpetual irritation was kept up between the two countries through the determination of the western pioneers to stretch their boundaries to the Pacific, taking the land surveyor along with them. ”

“ Oregon has less vacant or public land than from its area might be expected. The bounty of government in donating to the pioneer settlers six hundred and forty acres to a family—three hundred and twenty to the husband, and the same amount to the wife—and to single men and women three hundred and twenty each, provided they lived upon or improved their claims, disposed of most of the cultivable area west of the Cascade Range. ”

“ But the friends of Oregon in congress, who cared not overmuch about the question of slavery or of free soil, were touched by the fidelity to the government of the United States of the Oregon settlers, and anxious to have them rewarded as congress had, year after year, proposed to do—by liberal donations of land. The Linn bill had done its work in populating the Wallamet Valley, and the population of this valley had determined the title to the country. ”

“ The lack of schools was deeply deplored by many of these hardy pioneers, men and women, though some were more fortunate. Many remember with affection and respect one who came from her New England home and most conscientiously taught the fortunate children entrusted to her care. School days under her wise and kind guidance, and ofttimes in most picturesque spots, are bright and happy memories of many men and women today. ”

“ In 1785, two years only after our independence was secured, and six years after the congress of the states had suggested to the several commonwealths the propriety of contracting their boundaries in order to enable the United States to clear themselves of debt, and to be possessed of a public domain, when only New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia had ceded any territory, an ordinance was passed providing for the survey of these lands, and the uses to which they should be put. ”

“ The same day the British Minister at Madrid presented a counter declaration accepting the declaration of the Spanish King as offering "full and entire satisfaction" for the injury complained of, in which counter declaration, however, it was added at the same time "that it is to be understood that neither the said declaration, nor the acceptance thereof in the name of the King, is to preclude or prejudice, in any respect, the rights which His Majesty may claim to any establishment which his subjects may have formed, or should be desirous of forming in the future, at the said Bay of Nootka." ”

“ It is a pleasure to the properly constituted mind to know to whom to give credits. It is also a satisfaction to remove from history falsehoods, whether153 deliberate or accidental, which blind our vision as to the verity of so-called history.16
As a matter of fact, from 1803 to 1848, in each of the twelve territories organized from the public lands, the sixteenth section in every township was reserved for school purposes, Oregon being the first to receive the addition of the thirty-sixth. There has been no fixed rule of appropriation, much depending upon the people and their representatives. ”

“ Men will gradually accustom themselves to deserts, and will cause them to blossom like the rose. Wherever they go, the foundation of a home is awaiting them, and the common school is provided for their children. It is thus we are educating the nations.
It can hardly be superfluous to revert to the obligation of the general government and the individual state to remember and guard the people's rights in the public157 domain. ”

“ In so far as Britain succeeded in maintaining in this convention this claim to the right of settlement, in so far was Spain's claim to absolute sovereignty to this region practically modified and limited. Unless Spain speedily made good her reserved right of sovereignty by actual occupation of the region in question, she must consent henceforth to hold her right of settlement as limited by a similar right now conceded to Britain. It is at this point in history, at the Nootka Convention, that the Oregon Question takes definite form: Whose shall the territory be? ”

“ William M. Gwin, Senator from California, remarking on the transfer of the public lands from the Treasury Department to the Department of the Interior in 1849, says: "When a territorial government was established over Oregon, some able men contended for four sections for each township, and they succeeded in getting two," and quotes from Walker's report.15 He also referred, in a speech before the State Convention of California in 1850, to Piper and Walker as authors of the movement to increase the amount of school land in the new states. ”

“ Others have professed or proposed to derive the name of Oregon from the Spanish word "oreja," the ear—supposing that the Spaniards noted the big ears of the native Indians and named the country from the circumstance. But the Spaniards themselves have left no record of the kind; nor has it been noted, so far as we are aware, that the ears of our Indians were remarkably large. The word "orejon" is nearer our form ”

“ John McLoughlin, backed by the millions of the company, and a disciplined host in possession of the good-will and salutary respect of the Indians. But the American missionaries remained on the ground, established stations, accumulated stores, formed nuclei of settlements through their lay helpers, and correctly conceived policies of inuring the Indians through example and precept to a status of settled agricultural life. Then come strong mountain men, who had had their fill of experience as solitary trappers in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. ”

“ Doctor Coues was the son of Samuel Elliott Coues and Charlotte Haven Ladd Coues, born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, September 9, 1842. His literary tastes were inherited from his father, who was a writer on scientific subjects. He was educated at Ganzaga College and Columbia University, Washington, D. C., from which he graduated in 1861. He continued to reside at the capital, and his life was spent in contact with all that was strongest and best in a nation which his talents helped to make conspicuous in the fields of science and literature. ”