Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/21

Rh life of any community, while among the employees were reckless characters unfit for any other life than one based upon absolute authority and autocratic rule. Most numerous were the Indian races whose life was undisturbed and whose social standards affected everything about them. The company was interested that such a social life should be continued in the interests of the business, and that a region capable of sustaining a large population should be kept a vast hunting ground fit to support only the few who lived within it and the stockholders whose interest in the region ended with the payment of their dividends. A society of another kind, however, would have been out of place where the fur trading company was in harmony with the surroundings. It was a social and industrial life well adapted to the conditions and did its part in the process of evolution. It will always furnish an interesting period to the student of Oregon history, as it is reviewed with something of the halo which the imagination throws about it. Its place in the industrial evolution is fixed because of its utilization of a superficial resource, but it is fortunate that it gave place in good time to other industries and other forms of social life that were better and higher.

As the product of the fur bearing animals was the determining influence in the first phase of Oregon's social life, the agricultural resources were the determining influence in that of the second. The transition was one from a superficial resource to one more latent, from an industry adapted to the support of a small population to one capable of supporting large numbers. The transition was so gradual that for years the two industries existed side by side, the one gaining while the other was losing its hold upon the community. The transition was a period of conflict, as the sources of Oregon's early history bear ample evidence. The interpreter of the sources,