Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/375

Rh The Argus, however, placed the name of Gaines at the head of the editorial columns as its candidate for delegate to congress. The Portland Times was strongly democratic, and sustained the nomination of Lane. The Portland Democratic Standard labored earnestly for the election of Judge O. C. Pratt, but Lane was destined to secure the prize and received the nomination from the Salem convention, which was a great disappointment to Pratt's friends.

Lane arrived in Oregon early in April, and soon after the convention the campaign began, the whigs and know-nothings, or native Americans, uniting on Gaines and against the democracy.

The native Americans, it may be here said, were largely drawn from the missionary and anti-Hudson's Bay Company voters, who took the opportunity furnished by the rise of the new party to give utterance to their long-cherished antipathies toward the foreign element in the settlement of Oregon. Some of them were men who had made themselves odious to right-thinking people of all parties by their intemperate zeal against foreign-born colonists and the catholic religion, basing their arguments for know-nothing