Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/64

58. And, although the population was more than doubled when the amendment was resubmitted in 1900, the vote throughout the state stood, ayes, 26,265; noes, 28,402. It will thus be seen that although the "no" vote was only augmented in sixteen years by 226, the affirmative vote was increased by 15,042. One county gave a majority for the amendment in 1884. The vote in 1900 gave us two-thirds of the counties of the state. One county was lost by a tie, one by a majority of one, and one by a majority of thirty-one.

With the advent of the Lewis and Clarke Exposition in 1905, came for the first time into Oregon the officers and organizers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who held a convention in Portland in June of that year; and finding here a (to them) unprecedented array of public sentiment favoring the suffrage movement, and erroneously attributing its popularity to themselves, managed by a clever ruse to remain till after the June election of 1906, for which five years of steady local effort had paved the way leading to an initiative petition to secure, for the third time in the history of our movement, the submission of a constitutional amendment to a referendum vote of the electorate of the state; and, though we had been sure of at least thirty-six thousand votes for the affirmative before our national friends had entered Oregon at all, and although there was no lack of logic, brilliancy or wit among our imported co-workers, they made the mistake they had often previously made in other state suffrage campaigns, of enlisting a little organization of well-meaning women of one political idea, who got up meetings for them all over the state, under a prohibition coloring, to which the business men of the state have ever since falsely accused the suffragists of pandering under a thin disguise.

Eastern and southern women do not understand the liberty-loving spirit of our western border; and their control of our campaign of 1906 brought to us our first organized opposition to our cause, that, owing to the rapid increase of negative votes from older states which followed the Lewis and Clarke Exposition, would seem hopeless but for the fact that our affirmative vote has practically held its own through two subsequent elections, while the overwhelming vote of 1910 for the reenfranchisement of the women of Washington, who had been voters in territorial days, has reassured our weary workers and brought us out of the ambush that kept us silent and defenseless through our electoral campaign of 1908 and 1910, which men voted down.

Our initiative petitions are ready for the submission of our equal suffrage amendment to the voters of 1912; and we, having emerged from seclusion, are pressing forward in the open, in the serene belief that our fathers, husbands, brothers and sons will proudly emulate the chivalrous voters oi Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Washington, who have extended the full privileges of the elective franchise to their best and truest friends, the women within their borders. Our shibboleth for 1912 is Votes for Women, our motto for the campaign is Make Oregon Free.

Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway, affectionately known in later years throughout the Pacific northwest as "Oregon's Grand Old Woman," having omitted in her autobiographical sketch, as chronicled in these pages, all mention of the distinguished honors accorded to her during the varying vicissitudes of her long and busy life, it falls to the pleasant lot of a friend to chronicle some of the more significant incidents of her public and private history, which have made her name a household word in thousands of homes.

Mrs. Duniway first came into prominence in 1859 through the publication of a little book entitled "Captain Gray's Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon." "The book was never worthy of the public attention it received, and I have always wondered at its sale," said the motherly old lady