Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/368

362 in economic development that has not yet passed beyond the agricultural stage has tended to make the general features of its policies in respect both to revenue and to expenditure to persist.

No aspect or topic of the finances of the Provisional Government, so far as the author is aware, has ever been discussed. The bibliography of the subject, therefore, is wholly a matter of the existence and condition of the documents which afford the data. The original documents, including the reports of the treasurers and the auditors and of the committees of ways and means and of appropriations, the messages of the executives and the legislative journals and session laws, are not only not complete in the archives of the State, but they are only slightly segregated and none has been mounted, or bound. Miscellaneous bundles of these original papers have to be searched by any one who wishes to investigate any phase of commonwealth history. This recourse to these original documents is necessary, not only because no printed collection contains all of the documents extant—nor do they all taken together include all of them—but also because of the grave errors which abound in them in printed form.

"The Oregon Archives," compiled by Lafayette Grover and printed in 1853, purports to include "the journals, governors' messages, and public papers of Oregon from the earliest attempt on the part of the people to form a government, down to, and inclusive of the session of the Territorial Legislature held in the year 1849." They were collected and published pursuant to an act of the Legislative Assembly, passed January 26, 1853. The collection is but fragmentary. Annual executive messages and portions of journals of