Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/181

 It was during these years that John Lyle knew a spiritual temptation—perhaps a new impulse stirred by Jesse Applegate's convincing logic, perhaps a fruition of those impulses that had primarily led him to Oregon. There is evidence that Oregon held for many minds a mystic attraction as a land of social regeneration. Horace S. Lyman in his history of Oregon says:

"Interest in Oregon as a field for establishing society upon a new and wider plan, without the evils of older communities, continued to attract hither young men of good education and idealistic minds."

Dreams of Utopia were not new. They have been recorded since the days of Plato's Republic. Perhaps there is no finer monument to ideal democracy than the establishment of the provisional government of Oregon—a government self-imposed—by subtlest diplomacy winning the "consent of all the governed',, composed of factions whose interests were diametrically opposed —American and British, Catholic and Protestant. Conditions following the discovery of gold seemed to early settlers to have permanently altered the trend of thought in the Willamette Valley. When Jesse Applegate, man of practical initiative and sane judgment, proposed to a chosen few the establishment of a social colony in southern Oregon for themselves and their families, the men listened eagerly and with growing enthusiasm. Far into the night, said Ellen Lyle in later years, the men would sit and talk and plan. The young wives talked, too, of the sacrifices of their first married years, of their babes, of the future and said that they would not go! Jesse Applegate went and became known as the "Sage of Yoncalla."

Oregon was recognized as a territory, donation land rights were upheld, and on August 20th, 1850, Ellen Lyle mounted her horse and took Joan in her arms and John Lyle mounted her horse with Harriet on before and they turned toward the claim they had taken but never occu-