Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/138

130 house. The new departure of granting section thirty-six, as well as section sixteen, of each township of the public domain for the creation of a common school fund was inaugurated by Congress in the organization of Oregon Territory. The usual two-township grant was also made to aid in the establishment of a university. 1 It was thus left to the people of the Terri- tory to have recourse to the usual forms of taxation only for means necessary to administer the laws made by the territorial legislature.

The funds from these several sources were in the custody of and under the control of different officials. The Governor mediated in the application of the appropriations for the territorial library and the public buildings ; 2 the Secretary of the Territory, also holding his position through appointment by the national executive, administered, under the strict surveillance of a United States treasury official, the funds for the support of the civil establishment; while those obtained through taxation and from the sale of territorial school and university lands were in the hands of the Territorial Auditor and Territorial Treasurer. These two officials were elected annually by the Legislative Assembly. There were thus three main sources of territorial revenues : Congressional appropriations, proceeds from the sales of edu- cational land grants, and revenues from taxation the Con- gressional appropriations being administered by officials re- sponsible to federal authorities, while revenues from taxation and from the sale of territorial school and university lands

1 While small sums accumulated during this period both for the common school fund and for the university fund, the income from neither of them was made to serve its purpose until after the period of statehood. An abortive effort was made to utilize the university fund. 2 Congress regularly deputed to the territorial legislature to select, with the concurrence of the Governor, the places where the institutions and public build- ings were to be located. The Oregon legislature did not proceed in this matter with the deference to Governor Gaines that was consonant with his joint author- ity so his refusal to recognize its omnibus location act as a law of the Territory engendered such fierce factional strife that it was afterwards referred to as the "location war."