FINANCIAL HISTORY OF OREGON
Prepared under the direction of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Economics and Sociology.
THREE PERIODS OF ITS DEVELOPMENT.
Political organization in what is now the State of Oregon has assumed, in turn, three well developed and quite distinct phases, and there was naturally a characteristic financial system and practice for the support of each. A provisional government antecedent to the territorial organization under the Government of the United States had its initial development early in 1841.[1] A judge with probate powers and the essential ministerial officials for his court were elected at a mass meeting of the settlers in the Willamette Valley. Two years later this nucleus was expanded into a full fledged, though primitive, political organization. As the appointive officials of a typical territorial government did not supercede it until March 3, 1849, this virtually autonomous regime had ample time to exhibit its traits and tendencies. The territorial period was prolonged to a decade, as the act for the admission of Oregon into the Union was passed February 14, 1859.
The Provisional Government was, it is true, weak in resources, transient in purpose, and primitive in its machinery and devices, yet its officials had to exercise about all the
- ↑ Civil authority was represented in this region still earlier, but it did not have consecutive development. Under the act of Parliament merging the Northwest Company into the Hudson Bay Company officials of the latter under appointment by the Crown exercised powers of justice of peace over British subjects west of the Rocky Mountains; and in 1838 the Methodist Mission, then the main nucleus of American settlement in the Willamette Valley, vested one of their number with legal authority among themselves.
