Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/487

436 of 1843, which extended jurisdiction over the whole Oregon Territory, and held out no threat of outlawry to a portion of its inhabitants, It was one of those fine points which in the existing political conditions of the colony could not be rashly approached. The friends of the original organic laws, who resented the legislation of 1844 as an affront to the wisdom of the first legislature, saw fit to construe the act to mean that protection was withheld from such Americans as might settle north of the Columbia, and accused the legislatures of acquiescing in the claim of the British government, which sought to make that river the northern boundary of the United States.

So positive and determined was the opposition to any such admission, even by implication, that at the second session of the committee, in December, an explanatory act was passed defining the boundaries of Oregon as lying between latitudes 42° and 54° 40', and extending from the Rocky Mountains to the sea. This made plain the position of the British residents in Oregon; they were without a foothold in it.

The prying eyes of the legislative committee of 1844 discovered that the marriage law of Oregon was open to objection upon the ground that it rendered invalid marriages contracted without the consent of the parents where either of the contracting parties were under the age of twenty-one, and exposed the couple to the charge of living in adultery as well as their children to the taint of bastardy. The judiciary committee therefore amended the 17th article of the