money for the erection of light-houses at the mouth of the Columbia and at the entrance to Admiralty Inlet; a section forbidding the obstruction of the Oregon rivers by dams which would prevent the free passage of salmon; and a section appropriating $10,000 to be expended under the direction of the president, in payment of the services and expenses oi the persons engaged by the provisional government to convey communications to and from the United States, as also the purchase of such presents for the Indians as might be required to make peace with them.[1]
It is asserted by Thornton that he secured the amendments on commerce,[2] and knowing nothing to the contrary, I shall hope that he did so, because he should have done something to earn the money for his expenses, which charitable members of congress were induced to procure for him out of the public treasury. The bill as it now stood, with the ordinance of 1787 and all, passed the house on the 2d of August by a vote of one hundred and twenty-nine to seventyone, and was sent to the senate, where for nine days it received the same discursive treatment to which the senate bill had been subjected, but was finally passed between nine and ten o'clock Sunday morning, August 13th, after an all-night session.
Seldom was there so determined opposition to a bill as that offered by the southern senators to the establishment of Oregon Territory: not, as they themselves said, from a want of sympathy with the people of that isolated section of the country, who were, as all believed, still engaged in a bloody contest with hostile savages; nor from a conviction that slavery would strike root in this far northern soil; but only from a sense of the danger to their sacred institution from extending the principles of the ordinance of 1787 to
- ↑ By the language of this appropriation the $10,000 was intended for Meek and his associates. Meek received a large share of it, and the Indians not any. See Victor's River of the West, 458–02. Thornton also received money for his expenses, probably from the contingent fund.
- ↑ Or. Pioneer Assoc. Trans., 1874, 94.
