HOW BRITISH AND AMERICAN SUBJECTS UNITE IN A COMMON GOVERNMENT FOR OREGON TERRITORY IN 1844*
By Robert C. Clark, Ph.D.
It is not the purpose of this paper to state with any detail the already so well-told story of the organization of a Pro- visional Government in Oregon. The main features of that narrative have been too long a matter of record and based upon too complete evidence to need repetition at my hands. Such of its details are as given elsewhere will, so far as is consistent with clearness, be omitted here. This paper is, therefore, an attempt to supplement and correct existing accounts. It is now possible to perform such a task by the discovery of new materials in the form of letters written by officials of the Hudson's Bay Company 1 and by a more thorough use of the well known sources. To make needed additions to the existing accounts of the movement on the part of the settlers of the Willamette Valley to establish a government in the years 1841-1843; to explain the influences opposing this enterprise; to give more definitely the sources of the first constitution; and lastly, to tell how a union of all the people of Oregon territory south of the Columbia river, British and Ameri- cans, was brought about in 1844, these in brief are the aims of this paper.
While the Oregon country was occupied jointly by British and American citizens with equal right from the agreement of 1818 to the treaty of 1846 that established the northern boundary of the United States west of the Rocky Mountains, neither Great Britain nor the United States extended any governmental authority over the territory. The former in- trusted to the Hudson's Bay Company the power to keep order and administer justice for her subjects, the latter left her citizens entirely to their own resources. The officials of the Hudson's Bay Company, located at Vancouver on north bank of the Columbia, had the authority of magistrates and could
Paper read before Pacific Branch American History Association, April 6, 1912. Copies of these have been kindly loaned to the author by Professor Schafer.
