Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/60

50 university and agricultural college, and five hundred thousand acres along with five per cent of the sales of public lands were given to an internal improvement fund to be used by the state. Add to this the swamp lands, amounting to several hundred thousand acres of the most valuable, all given without cost, and one might well ask, "in the name of common sense what more should a paternal government do for a people?" And yet it has done more. Coast defenses and lighthouses have been built, the rivers dredged, harbors improved, something near a million dollars appropriated to cut a canal around the cascade falls, and military roads and posts established to protect our inhabitants from the aborigines.

In common with all the other inhabitants of the United States, we have been suffering for the last few years from an aggravating increase of our great American industry, politics, but until the discovery was made, that people can grow rich by taxing themselves, the people of Oregon were contented with small levies for public purposes. Indeed, we have done little in the way of public improvements to create expense. With the exception of county roads, which are mainly ungraded dirt ways, and the bridging of streams, nothing of importance has been attempted.

In view of all the foregoing comes the sharp contrast of the present condition of the pioneers and their immediate descendants. In the absence of any reliable census reports, I have been obliged to rely upon regional inspection, taking a township here and there and tracing up the career of the first white inhabitants. For this purpose I have selected, for an average, one hundred square miles on the east side of the Willamette Valley, in Marion County, which contains the state capital, and an examination shows that sixty-six per cent of the donation claims have passed out of the possession of the donees and their