Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/86



78 CHARLES B. MOORES

With possibly three exceptions, Matthieu was the youngest man of the group. His was not a chance, or accidental vote. It was the vote of a man of decision and of character. He was but 25 years of age, but a mature man in experience. His vote was the vote of one who was at once a Fre'nch fugi- tive, and a British alien. He carried with him, boy that he was, the vote of his friend, Etienne Lucier, a mature man of 60 years, and he carried it in the face of his friendship for his ideal, Dr. McLoughlin, and against the judgment of the majority of his friends of the Catholic faith, and his French- Canadian countrymen. In that vote there was some indication of the character of the man.

For a full 71 years he went in and out among his fellow men in this community, where in early manhood he cast his fortunes, and during all those years he measured up to the requirements of that standard of citizenship which is the very foundation of a'n ideal commonwealth. Although without political ambition, he was a man of public spirit, and, although a member of the minority party, served his fellow citizens of this county as commissioner, and as a member of the Oregon House of Representatives at the sessions of 1874 and 1878. He was one of the founders, and the first president, of the Oregob State Pioneer Association, chosen at a time when the pioneer element was the dominant element of the state, and the best blood of the Association was subject to call. In 1846 he secured the donation claim that for the remaining 62 years of his life was his continuous home. He was married April 15, 1846, to Rose Osant, whose father, Louis Osant, had been a Hudson Bay Company employe and trapper, and who was one of the 50 arrayed against him at the meeting of May 2, 1843. His relationship to that meeting, and conditions that later existed, have given to F. X. Matthieu a peculiar distinc- tion. It was a close vote, and a chance friendship, that gave to him, and to Lucier, the opportunity to forever fix the polit- ical status of a great state a group of states to change the currents of the world's history, the destiny of a nation, and the individual destinies of millions of men. Had the vote and