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Rh  in the ascendency. Then came the great immigration of the fall of that year with numbers and strength of leadership that crowded the earlier elements to the background. They were in great majority in the Legislature of 1844 and treated the organic law adopted before their coming very lightly. This body virtually made and adopted without submission to the people a new constitution. It repudiated the term "territory," excluded the British subjects from the compact and carried the air of representatives of a community aiming at independence and sovereignty. The Legislature that assembled in June, 1845, in drawing up a new organic law that it submitted to the people for ratification and in taking steps to fuse the British with the American elements of the population and in expressing in the organic laws their purpose as a transient one, again changed the essential character of the organization and that which it received this time it retained until superseded as a provisional government.

A small community dwelling in a wilderness, and separated by a two-thousand-mile stretch of it from their kin and the nearest people who would have any disposition to come to their aid, would naturally be supposed to make the means of defense their chief concern and the support of these establishments the chief item in their budget. But the native tribes of the Willamette and the lower Columbia had suffered repeated visitations of a very destructive pestilence. This had made room for a white settlement without any necessary intrenchment upon the possessions of others. The Oregon colony stood in little fear of awakening the resentment of any in their immediate vicinity who might become a dangerous foe. However, in the distant valleys of Southern Oregon and on the Upper Columbia, east of the Cascade Mountains, there were—as we shall see—strong tribes who, when aroused by the increasing annual cavalcades traversing their domains to a sense of apprehension as