Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/334

240 and bowling alley rooms, one book store, one drug store, one picture gallery, one shoe store, one candy factory, half a dozen tobacco shops, twenty-five general stores of dry goods and groceries, ten exclusively dry goods stores, and seven exclusively grocery stores, two feed stores, and two hardware stores.

Up to 1854, what is now known as Multnomah county, was a part of Washington county, and the Portland people had to go out to the village of Hillsboro to transact their county business, and fight out their law suits. In this year the legislature divided the territory of Washington, setting off the present Multnomah by itself and making Portland the county seat. And this gave Portland quite a little "boost" on the road to greater prosperity.

In 1855 and '56 the Indian war broke out on the upper Columbia and made traveling dangerous if not impossible in both Or^on and Washington territory. Portland became, in consequence thereof, the chief supph- point and the outfitting point for all the military forces. A general camp and headquarters was established across the river in what is now East Portland, from whence the volunteers were carried by steamboat to the Cascades, where the first fighting took place. This military preparation and expense stimulated business at all tile stores, but it checked all building operations, mainly because all the fighting men had gone out after the Indians, and but few were left to hammer and saw.

This Indian war was inevitable. It had been brewing for a long time. Its first outcrop was the murder of Whitman and his family, and dependants. The seething storm was ill-concealed from such careful observers of Indian character as McLoughlin. Meek, Ogden, and Newell. McLoughlin constantly warned the settlers to be prepared, while at the same time he strove to hold in check the determined chiefs of the restless, dissatisfied tribes. "Is it right to kill the Americans?" asked a Cascade chief of McLoughlin one day. "What," roared the doctor. "They or we must die," calmly replied the Indian. "Not only do they spoil otu" forests, and drive away our game, depriving us of food and clothing, but with their bad morals and religion they poison us with disease and death. We must kill them, or let them kill us."

That was the whole story; that was the view every Indian took of the situation. And the remnant of than feel that fate today. They are strangers and trespassers in the land the Great Spirit gave them. Hence, they are for the most part reserved, silent, sullen in their intercourse with the white people.

The first assessment for taxation shown by existing records, makes Portland property worth, in 1857, the sum of one million one hundred and three thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine dollars. The population of the town this year amounted to 1280. At the election held the next year, 1858, there were four hundred and sixty votes cast. The first daily paper was issued in 1859 by S. A. English &. Co., and called the "Portland Daily News." This was, however, not the first paper in the town. The Oregon Weekly Times, which was formerly the Western Star, of Milwaukee, and the Weekly Oregonian. had been published for nine years before this first daily. The Daily News did not last long, and after a few issues suspended permanently. The first issue of the Oregonian appeared on December 4, 1850. as a protege of the townsite proprietors. Its first issue was heralded with great eclat, and Col. Chapman sent a special messenger with a bundle of the first issue by horseback up the west side of the Willamette valley as far as Corvallis, and back down by the east side of the valley, giving Oregonians to everybody to read. Thomas J. Dryer was the founder of the paper, and its first editor. The paper started off at a lively gait, and has kept it up ever since, until now it has the largest circulation of any paper west of the Rocky mountains. The Oregon Times became a daily in 1860, and the Oregonian issued its first daily in 1861.

In the enrollment of school children in 1860, six hundred and ninety-one were found of school age; and the total population was two thousand nine hundred and seventeen, of which sixteen were negroes and twenty-seven Chinese.