so largely unsettled, roads were to be built, houses constructed, and the country made habitable, that the later immigrants were greatly in need of assistance. This Dr. McLoughlin continued to render.
In this sketch I cannot go into the matter of Dr. McLoughlin's part in the Oregon provisional government, which existed from May 2, 1843, until March 3, 1849, when the Oregon territorial government was established. Nor can I state many unfriendly actions against him and his land claim by Methodist missionaries and their followers. These missionaries were the leaders of a local political party known as the mission party. Owing to the absence of many residents in Oregon in the newly-discovered California placer mines, this party succeeded, in 1849, i^ electing Samuel R. Thurston, a new arrival, as the first delegate to congress from the territory of Oregon. He was a ready speaker, ambitious, and not over scrupulous. George Abernethy, one of the Lausanne party, a lay missionary, who had been steward of the Methodist mission, had charge of their store and of their secular affairs, and who had been governor under the provisional government, had become the owner of the Oregon Milling Company and he and his son claimed Abernethy Island. He and other conspirators against Dr. McLoughlin, found in Thurston a willing instrument to carry out their nefarious plans. They succeeded, through false and malicious representations by Thurston to congress, in having a clause inserted in the Oregon donation land law of September 27, 1850, giving Abernethy Island to Abernethy as assignee of the Oregon Milling Company, but under another name, and giving to the territory of Oregon the rest of Dr. McLoughlin's land claim, the proceeds from its disposal to be used for the establishment and endowment of a university. Almost all of Dr. McLoughlin's wealth was in this claim and in the mills and other buildings situated on it. Dr. McLoughlin sought redress from congress, but he was unsuccessful. While he was not actually ousted, he could not move nor sell his mills and other improvements. It resulted in his practical bankruptcy. He died at Oregon City September 3, 1857, a broken-hearted man, the victim of malice, mendacity and ingratitude. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John's (Catholic) church at Oregon City, where his body has lain ever since. In 1862, the legislature of the state of Oregon restored to Dr. McLoughlin's heirs all of the part of his land claim given to it by the donation land law.
In 1846, Pope Gregory XVI, in appreciation of Dr. McLoughlin's high character and his humanity, made him a knight of St. Gregory the Great, of civil grade.
It is one test of Dr. McLoughlin's high character and of his true worth that now, fifty-three years after his death, his name is venerated in Oregon, and his memory kept alive, not only by Oregon pioneers and their descendants, but by the people of Oregon as a whole. His full length portrait is hung in the place of honor in the senate chamber of the state capitol among portraits of former governors of Oregon. His reputation is that of Oregon's greatest citizen, its first ruler whose autocracy was necessary, but kindly, beneficent and efficient, a friend of the poor and distressed, and the savior of the early Oregon pioneers. By common consent, without dispute and without jealousy, he is known as the father of Oregon.
