Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/156

 148 ROBERT CARLTON CLARK This May assembly, undiscouraged by the desertion of al- most half their number, proceeded to elect a full corps of officers for the colony, excepting a governor. A legislative committee given authority to draft a constitution and laws, having com- pleted its work in the six days of session allowed, presented it to a meeting of the people held July 5. This meeting adopted the Organic Articles and Laws which thus became Oregon's first written constitution. The legislative committee of nine that made this contribu- tion to state constitution making were not lawyers. There were as yet no lawyers in the colony. Its chairman, Robert Moore, had been a member of the Missouri legislature. The leading spirit of the committee seems to have been Robert Shortess, a native of Ohio, formerly a school teacher, and of good education. He had been the principal mover in calling the meeting earlier in the year that had drawn up the petition to Congress complaining of the conduct of the Hudson's Bay Company, and now did most of the work of formulating the Organic Articles and Laws that were to give the colony an organized government. There happened to be in the settle- ment a copy of the statute laws of the Territory of Iowa enacted in 1838-39, and containing the Declaration of Inde- pendence, the Constitution of the United States, the Ordinance of Congress for the government of the Territory Northwest of the, River Ohio, 1787, an Act to divide the Territory of Wiscon- sin and to establish the territorial government of Iowa, and lastly the Statute Laws of Iowa arranged in alphabetical order beginning with "abatement" and ending with "worshipping congregations." With so much constitutional and legal material available, and such as had proved useful for the last and more infant of the territories of the United States, the work of the committee became largely a matter of compilation and adaptation. The Organic Articles as finally adopted are there- fore scarcely more than a rehash, with necessary changes in phraseology, of the Ordinance of 1787 and the Organic Law