Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/414

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
398
Frances Fuller Victor.

of the main street was one hundred feet, the middle of which was to be devoted to a public market. The land adjoining this and other towns was to be so subdivided as to give two hundred acres to each immigrant over fourteen years of age—married women excepted. Rectangular surveying of land and laying out of roads were recommended, while other details, extending even to missionary work among the natives, were attended to, many of which afterwards appeared in bills before congress.

One is reminded of Kelley's instrumentality in the settlement of Oregon by the improvements at present being made on "the peninsula,' where stands the mill town of Saint John, the terminus of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company's road, and the Portland (Catholic) University, as well as by the long line of warehouses between Saint John and East Portland proper. Kelley particularly honored the peninsula by adding to his writings a line plan of the town which he designed for that point. As a site for a city it has some excellent features, one of which is space to grow. Ultimately it will become a part of Greater Portland, but before it becomes absorbed in Portland, it would be a gracious suggestion to let it come in under the name of its intending colonizer, Hall J. Kelley.

It is impossible to show any other American at so early a period not only devoting himself to the intellectual labor of discussing the Oregon question, and to promoting colonization societies, but who undertook and overcame, without support, the cost and the perils of immigration with the sole object of verifying his teachings to the country. So completely was he sustained in his general views that we feel surprised at this day to notice how closely they agree with what is now known of this region. That he was later in life a victim of