Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/155

Rh rather than those of Illinois. Michigan. Ohio, Pennsylvania. New York, or Massachusetts? Why. after the resolution directing the use of the laws of New York, did the committee them aside and select the laws of the new Territory on this side the Mississippi? Did the members of that committee that met in the barn of the Methodist Mission have before them the statutes of these several States and after due examination and deliberation decided that the laws of Iowa were most fit for their circumstances? What suggested and what induced the adoption of the committee's report that the laws of Iowa should be adopted? In 1843 Iowa was but little more than a name to the people of the East, let alone to the pioneers of that remote Northwest. It could hardly be that many of Iowa's first settlers had left our eastern counties and journeyed across the Missouri and over the mountains, or around by Darien and up the coast and found lodgment in the valleys of the Columbia. Bancroft asserts that the early settlers in Oregon were not familiar with the laws of Iowa which they had adopted. What then led to their adoption?

It is not unlikely that some of the committee that drew up the original draft for the articles providing for the Provisional Government possessed or happened to u r et possession of a copy of the Iowa laws enacted in 1838-39, and thus it was mere chance, and the urgency of circumstances, that pressed the settlers on to the speedy establishment of some form of government that brought about the transplanting of Iowa's tirst laws to Oregon. It is to be recalled that the Territorial Printer at Burlington was delayed for months in publishing our first laws because he could not get a copy of