Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/56

38 Besides church-going, attending singing-school, and visiting among the neighbors there were few assemblages. There was occasionally a ball, which was not regarded by the leading Protestant citizens as the most unquestionable mode of cultivating social relations. The Canadian families loved dancing, and balls were not the more respectable for that reason; but the dancers cared little for the absence of the élite. Taking them all in all, says Burnett, "I never saw so fine a population;" and other writers claimed that though lacking in polish the Oregon people were at this period morally and socially the equal of those of any frontier state. From the peculiar conditions of an isolated colony like that of Oregon, early marriages became the rule. Young men required homes, and young women were probably glad to escape from the overfilled hive of the parental roof to a domicile of their own. However that may have been, girls were married at any age from fourteen upward, and in some instances earlier; while no widow, whether