forms of political function—excepting participation in international affairs—that a civilized people depends upon its public agencies to take upon themselves.[1] We shall see that the exigencies in their situation called into existence, in a more or less inchoate state, a postal department and a bureau of coinage. The judgments of its courts, too, were in all cases final, and it had single handed to meet the test of a war.
The isolation which called for the exercise of sovereign powers by the Provisional Government had its influence upon the scope of public activity—and consequently upon the financial system—in Oregon not only after it attained the status of a Territory, but even after it had become a State. The precipitant movements of population to remoter outlying district under the influence of gold-mining excitement naturally led to clashes with Indian tribes. These disturbances called for the more immediate presence of military force than the distant national authority before the days of telegraphic dispatches could supply. These campaigns by State troops meant peculiar financial burdens and policies characteristic of an isolated community of the Far West. This remoteness during the Civil War period, when the continent had not yet been spanned by the railway, also tended to differentiate financial operations of the Oregon Government during that epoch from those of the typical American commonwealth.
From the nature of its distinctive successive forms of political organizations we have three periods in the financial history of Oregon: The Provisional Government, from 1841 to 1849; the Territorial, from 1849 to 1859; the commonwealth period since. It is to be noted, however, that a close continuity in the spirit and character of its population and
- ↑ Among the powers granted to the House of Representatives of the Provisional Government under its organic law of 1845 were the following: "To regulate the intercourse of the people with the Indian tribes, to establish post-offices and post roads, to declare war, suppress insurrection or repel invasion, * * * to regulate the currency and international police of the country."
