Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/383

 FEDERAL RELATIONS OF OREGON

365

only did he secure the donation land act, the essential idea of which. had been in Dr. Linn's bill many years before, and a bounty land law, but appropriations for paying the expenses of the Cayuse War, for extra customs houses, for government buildings and a penitentiary (most of which was wasted so that later $67,000 more was appropriated), for light houses,

and for the expenses of an extra session of the Well Legislature. might he move that a bill for building roads and bridges at an expense of $100,000 be laid aside because he did not wish to draw too heavily upon the treasury or upon the good nature of Congress "who have treated me with such for surveying,

magnanimity." Thurston's acquisitive example was followed by the second Delegate, Joseph Lane, who had lost his position of territorial governor when the Whig administration came in. 35

Lane succeeded

in obtaining additional

money

to settle the

War

and also an act to pay the exin incurred the Rogue River War, in which he had pense taken an active part when governor. Military roads added expenses of the Cayuse

$40,000 to be expended in the territory, although some queswas raised as to whether such an appropriation could

tion

constitutionally be

made.

Military roads, however, were felt to be a necessity in dealing with the Indian outbreaks which took place with especial ferocity in the summer of 1855 and had not wholly ended until 1857.

The most serious of the Indian wars in Oregon Rogue River country in Southern Oregon and

started in the

involved most of the tribes of that region. Its story forms a part of the local history of Oregon but it had a side which 36 Like most of the particularly brought in the United States, Indian wars it represented on one side the Indian's determina-

man from overrunning his hunting was on the other the white man's desire to clear grounds;

tion to keep the white

35 Globe, XXIII, 67; Lane was called by Ewing of Ohio (Whig) one of the electioneering office holders who had so abused Taylor in the presidential campaign, when the question of his removal from, office had been brought up in the

House. 36 See Bancroft, History of Oregon, No. 66, 34th Cong., ist Ses.

II,

chapters 12, 15, 16.

Sen. Ex. Doc.