Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/410

404 explain some rather anomalous features that you see in it, and will indicate the conditions under which it lives and must work. out its development. Institutions, like plants and animals, must develop their strength out of the elements, of the environment which is their habitat. After we have before us the salient factors in the situation under which this Society has lived and developed its restricted activities, and appreciating the exigent needs of skilfully classified data covering all subjects, if public interests rapidly growing in magnitude and complexity are to be conserved, a program of more effective activity and larger usefulness for this society can be outlined.

The spirit of a historical society is necessarily strongly affected by what was unique in the discovery and exploration of the land that is its home and in the origin of the people whose interests it conserves. There was a large measure of the heroic in the founding of the Oregon community and a large degree of autonomy exercised in its early history. Historical literature makes use of the expression "the Oregon Country." The discovery of the Columbia with its empire by Captain Gray, the exploration of this section of the continent by Lewis and Clark, the initiative in the exploitation of this other side of the continent by the enterprise of Astor, the extension of the operations of the American fur traders across the continent, the on-coming and the organization of the homebuilding pioneers on this western slope—all taking place before the home government had secured sovereignty over this imperial region—each and all of these achievements kindle historical sentiment and arouse an historical consciousness among the later generations making their home here. What was more natural than that as these deeds became hallowed with time the surviving actors in great drama and their sons and daughters should associate themselves that they might the better live over again a