Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/169

Rh all that portion of the Willamette Valley south of Benton and Linn; and Umpqua, comprising all the country south of the Calapooya mountains and headwaters of the Willamette. County seats were located in Linn, Polk, and Clatsop, the county seats of Clackamas and Washington having been established at the previous sessions of the legislature.

The act passed by the first legislature for collecting the county and territorial revenues was amended; and a law passed legalizing the acts of the sheriff of Linn county, and the probate court of Yamhill county, in the collection of taxes, and to legalize the judicial proceedings of Polk county; these being cases where the laws of the previous sessions were found to be in conflict with the organic act. Some difficulty had been encountered in collecting taxes on land to which the occupants had as yet no tangible title. The same feeling existed after the passage of the donation law, though some legal authorities contended, and it has since been held that the donation act gave the occupant his land in fee simple, and that a patent was only evidence of his ownership. But it took more time to settle these questions of law than the people or the legislature had at their command in 1850; hence conflicts arose which neither the judicial nor