Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/668

Rh According to eastern journals, the president had in readiness a full register of officials in case the Oregon bill passed the senate. But there were those in Oregon who thought the colony too far advanced in self-government to be treated like a new territory, and that they were entitled to select their own officers. A convention at Lafayette was proposed for the purpose of memorializing the president as to appointing Oregon men to offices in the territory; but local jealousies defeated the scheme. However, the convention appointed a committee, consisting of Burnett, George L. Curry, then editor of the Spectator, and L. A. Rice, to draught a memorial to congress upon the wants of Oregon, to be submitted to the people for their signatures. The memorialists complained of neglect. They declared that they did not leave their homes to traverse, with wives and children, uninhabited wastes to reach their present abode from ignoble motives; they had been animated by a desire not only to benefit themselves and their children, but to aid their common country in sustaining her rights on the Pacific, and to bring to a satisfactory close the long and harassing controversy with a foreign rival;