Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/112

96 across the continent of America was, indeed, the most extraordinary of migratory movements since the date of authentic history. From the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River it was a movement by comparatively short and easy stages; from the Mississippi westward it was a single leap. The slender column pushed its way over plains and mountains, through hostile native tribes and arid wilderness—the first parties requiring more than a year for the journey; the later ones, as the routes become better known, not less than six months. Quite as long, though with less danger, fatigue, and privation, was the voyage by sea around the continent to these western shores of America. Nearer to us than Jamestown and Plymouth is the heroic age.

But I am not to speak to-day of the discovery, exploration, migration, and settlement. It is the Provisional Government, created upon this spot, May 2, 1843, that is our theme to-day. At the outset I shall quote a remark made by an eminent citizen of honored memory. Judge William Strong, who, in an address before the Pioneer Society of Oregon in 1879, said: "Oregon owes by far the most of its prosperity and rapid progress to the early formation of the Provisional Government, the wise laws which were enacted, and the inflexible justice with which they were administered."

In pioneer days in Oregon, as elsewhere in America, the beginning of settlement was followed almost immediately by organization of government. The instinct of the race to which we belong to establish civil institutions and to organize government under regular forms of law was manifest here before there were so many as one hundred persons of American nativity in the whole country west of the Rocky Mountains. Joint occupation of the country by British subjects, and by people from the United States, each party hoping to hold the great Pacific North-