Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/307

Rh Advantage was sought to be taken by some of that clause in the donation law which declared that no laws passed by the provisional legislature interfering with the primary disposal of the soil should be valid. But the courts held, very properly, that it had not been the intention of congress to interfere with the arrangements already made between the settlers as to the disposal of their claims, but that on the contrary the organic law of the territory distinctly said that all bonds and obligations valid under the laws of the provisional government, not in conflict with the laws of the United States, were to be valid under the territorial laws till altered by the legislature, and that the owners of town sites who had promised deeds were legally bound to furnish them on obtaining the title to the land. And the courts also decided that taxes should be paid on land claims before the patents issued, because by the act of September 27, 1850, the land was the property in fee simple of every claimant who had fulfilled the conditions of the law.

A question arose concerning the right of a man having an Indian woman for a wife to hold 640 acres of land, which was decided by the courts that he could so hold.

The Dalles town-site claim was involved in doubt and litigation down to a recent period, or during a term of twenty-three years. That the methodists first settled at this point as missionaries is known to the reader; also that in 1847 they sold it to Whitman, who was in possession during the Cayuse war, which drove all the white population out of the country. Thus the first claim was methodist, transferred to the presbyterians, and finally abandoned. But, as I have