ness affairs. Merchants did not honor even their own orders, for merchandise like salt was imperishable and always in demand.[1]
There is evidence to show that this unique legal tender legislation and particularly the special form it took was as much due to the general indebtedness of the people to their few merchants as it was to the scarcity of specie. The Legislature "fearing a general effort to force payment would be made by the merchants, and knowing there was not a sufficiency of the precious metals to pay the debts of the country, thought it their duty to do something to save the debtor from a ruinous sacrifice of property."[2] A correspondent to "The Spectator" estimated the number indebted to the Hudson Bay Company at this time as three thousand, and the number owing Dr. John McLoughlin—now retired from the Company and in business independently—as one thousand, while five hundred had not yet closed their accounts with the Methodist Mission.[3]
Treasury scrip was gradually shaped into a flat currency and must have largely superseded the merchants' orders. The Legislature by an act passed December, 1847, made it the duty of the Territorial Treasurer to exchange scrip of large denominations for the same amount—interest added—of smaller denominations.[4] In February, 1849—one of the last acts of the Legislature of the Provisional Government—scrip was adapted still more closely to the purposes of a circulating medium by a law requiring that all scrip issued in payment of interest, when scrip of larger denominations was presented for exchange into smaller denominations, should be non-interest bearing.[5] Still further to facilitate the use of scrip as the circulating medium the Treasurer was authorized to exchange or redeem all genuine or properly
- ↑ Bancroft's Oregon, Vol. II, pp. 14—15.
- ↑ The Spectator, May 14, 1846.
- ↑ The Spectator, May 28, 1846.
- ↑ Oregon Archives, Laws, p. 11.
- ↑ Oregon Archives, Laws, p. 67.
