Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/543

492 navy, a few months after the passage of the act, who sold it to a Mr Shelly, for the avowed purpose of using it as a pilot-boat.

The first bill passed by the duly authorized legislature was to prevent duelling; the immediate cause for it being a quarrel between S. M. Holderness and J. G. Campbell, both estimable citizens, who could think of no other honorable way out of their difficulties than mortal combat. On hearing of this, Applegate at once introduced a bill on the subject, asked for a suspension of the rules, secured its passage, and sent it to the governor to be signed, when it became a law within thirty minutes of its inception. Under its provisions the would-be duellists were arrested and placed under bonds ta keep the peace. Early in the session a bill was passed adopting the statutes of Iowa, so far as they were 'applicable to the circumstances of the country. This tendency in each legislative body to have its enactments based upon the code of Iowa was greatly a matter of necessity, owing to a scarcity of law-books in the territory, as I have explained; but with the legislature of 1845 it was something more. Iowa was a new state and nearest to Oregon. It was a free state, which the leading men in the colony had determined Oregon should be, and had passed its minority as Oregon was doing, under the ordinance of 1787, under conditions also similar to those of Oregon; and its laws moreover were less conservative and more progressive than those of the older states.

Having adopted a code and set the committees at work adapting it to the country's needs, which they did in a measure by adopting the laws of 1844, the next movement was to restore the jurisdiction of the provisional government to the country north of the Columbia River. This was done by setting off