Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/111

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We are here to-day to commemorate an event that took place on this spot eight and fifty years ago. That event was the birth of the first American commonwealth, the organization of the first American government on the Pacific Coast of the United States of America.

Oregon in those days was much more distant from our Atlantic States in time, and far more difficult to be reached, than America was from Europe when the settlement of the American continent began. The migration