Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/278



and requiring that the country should be held subject to the revenue laws of the United States. Congress took no action on this bill. ' '

In June, 1840, Senator Linn presented another memorial from Oregon, signed by seventy Americans, from which is taken the following extract :

"Your petitioners represent that they are residents in Oregon Territory, and citizens of the United States or persons desiring to become such. They further represent that they have settled themselves in said Territory under the belief that it was a portion of the public domain of the United States, and that they might rely on the Government thereof for the blessings of free institutions and the pro- tection of its arms. But your petitioners further represent that they are unin- formed of any acts of said Government by which its institutions and protection are extended to them; in consequence whereof, themselves and families are ex- posed to be destroyed by the savages AND OTHERS THAT WOULD DO THEM HARM. And j^our petitioners would further represent that they have no means of protecting their own and the lives of their families, other than self-constituted tribunals, organized and sustained by the power of an ill-instructed public opin- ion, and the resort to force and arms. And your petitioners represent these .means of safety to be an insufficient safeguard of life and property. Your petitioners therefore pray the Congress of the United States to establish a ter- ritorial government in Oregon Territory."

The above memorial is supposed to have been drafted by Rev. David Leslie, who was also the first justice of the peace. The words "and others that would do them harm" in the memorial was intended for the Hudson's Bay Company, and from all the surrounding facts, were wholly unjustified. The Hudson 's Bay Company in Oregon was then under the control of Dr. John McLoughlin, whose kindness and humanity had been so often and widely extended to starving immi- grants that no denial of the false 'accusation was necessary. If McLouglilin, or his Company, had desired to destroy or drive out the American settlers all that was necessary was for them, for such bloody work, was to give an intimation to the Indians, and every American settler would have been murdered within a week. At the time this last memorial was sent to Congress, thirty-five years after Lewis and Clark was here, the population of Oregon, exclusive of Hudson 's Bay employees, was about two hundred men and women adults. Of these about one- sixth were Canadians French; nine-tenths of them lived west of the Cascade mountains, and nearly all of that number in the Willamette Valley.

Having by these memorials made known their necessities and desires to Con- gress the people patiently waited for action. But the American Congress was too busily engaged in schemes down in the region of the Lone Star of Texas. The extension of slavery, and the balance of power between the free and the slave states was already then affecting and coloring every political movement very much as the tariff' and the trusts are at this day controlling the political and industrial life of the Nation. And thus matters dragged along in the far distant uneventful silence of Old Oregon until one of those sad dispensations of Providence that must come to all, fell upon the little American community on the Willamette — the death of Ewing Young. Young had come to Oregon from California with Hall J. Kelley in the same year that Rev. Jason Lee arrived overland from the Atlantic states. But instead of carrying a commission to preach the gospel as Lee had, it was his misfortune to be denounced by the