purposes. Such was the rigor resorted to in the effort to promote temperance, and prevent British subjects from defying colonial law.
But at the following session there was a reaction, the legislature taking advantage of its power under the organic law to regulate the manufacture and sale of wine and distilled spirituous liquors, to pass an act which allowed the manufacture and sale of them under certain restrictions. This act, like the previous one, was chiefly inspired by opposition to the fur company; it being held by the majority that so long as the company kept liquors in store at Vancouver to sell or to give away, Americans should not be deprived of the profits of the traffic.[1] Every British subject in the house voted against the new law, and Governor Abernethy vetoed it in an admirable message, recommending the repeal of the clauses making it an offence to give away a glass of liquor, and of that also which allowed the fines to be divided between the informant and the officers of the law, by which they became interested in the conviction of the person charged; and advising only the alteration of Burnett's law of 1844, to make it agree with the organic law, if it was in any way adverse to it. But the legislature passed their act over the governor's veto, and prohibition, which up to 1846 was the law and the rule in colonial Oregon, has never been restored.
Two new counties were created and organized: one called Lewis county on the north side of the Columbia, comprising all of Oregon Teritory north of that river, and west of the Cowlitz River, up to the latitude of 54° 40′; another called Polk County, south of Yamhill, comprising all the territory between the Willamette River and the Pacific Ocean, and extending from the southern boundary of Yamhill Countv, which line extended due west of George Gay's house, to the northern boundary of California.
- ↑ Tolmie's Puget Sound, MS., 22-3.
