Columbia. In the fall of that year some three thousand arrived. The Oregon Trail had become a national highway.[1]
In the spring of 1841 before the incongruous groups of fairly proportional strength had been overwhelmed by the plains-crossing pioneer an event took place that brought home to them a realization of their increasingly abnormal situation in being without officials with regularly commissioned public authority. Ewing Young, the wealthiest among the independent settlers, had died, and there were no known natural heirs to his estate. He had accounts, too, with different parties and of considerable size for a community so recently established. The net proceeds of his estate, composed mainly of horses and cattle, would constitute quite a legacy for this remote frontier people. To ward off the strife of anarchy that such a prize as this estate would have engendered all were disposed in the days following the funeral, February 17 and 18, 1841, to go so far toward organization as to appoint the officials necessary to probate this estate of Ewing Young; at the same time the element with strongest penchant for political activity seized the opportunity to secure the appointment of a committee to report on the advisability of organizing a general authority by drafting a constitution and a code of laws, to be submitted with a list of officials to a later meeting—if the committee appointed should agree on recommending organization. Partly because of group rivalries and partly because of the counsel against organization by both Dr. John McLoughlin, chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company, and Commodore Wilkes, then in that vicinity with a squadron on an exploring expedition—with both of whom the committee had been instructed to confer—the movement went no further. The "supreme judge with probate powers," however, proceeded in the fulfillment of his duty and appointed an administrator who took charge of the estate and made it yield a fine fund to be cov-
- ↑ The following estimates of the numbers in the annual immigrations subsequent to the year 1848 are given: 1844, 800; 1845, 3,000; 1846, 1,000; 1847, 4,500; 1848, 3,000.
