Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/664

Rh and silent, but implacable. He could treat with seeming openness a man who differed from him in opinion, or who competed with him for the public money or favor, while scheming against him, and entertaining for him a holy hatred. Withal he hated Catholics; and it was through these combined qualities that he was reëlected, while the majority of American voters preferred Lovejoy.

Abernethy was nominally the head of the American party as it had been when there was a Hudson's Bay party. No such association as the latter now existed, because the British inhabitants were politically fused with the Americans, and most of them were only waiting for an opportunity to become citizens of the United States. But the real American party was now, what it had been in the first days of the provisional government, opposed both to the foreign corporations and the Methodist Mission. That he could be elected, entertaining sentiments adverse to the free American as well as the foreign corporations, was owing to the qualities named. From this time for several years, the only parties in Oregon were the American and missionary, the governor belonging to the latter.

The summer rolled round, and September came—more than a year after the settlement of the boundary—before any information was received of the doings of the national legislature in the matter of Oregon's establishment as a territory, and then it was only to inflict further disappointment. The president had indeed recommended the establishment of a territorial government in Oregon, and a bill had been reported by Douglas of Illinois in December, which had passed the house the 16th of January; but there southern jealousy of free soil nipped it.

Other rumors reached Oregon City of the intentions of congress and the president. Private advices gave it as certain that an Oregon regiment of mounted riflemen was being raised; a splendid regiment, it