The new Northwest. [volume] (Portland, Or.) 1871-1887, 1877-07-20
CHAPTER ".

The weary trip across the Cascade
Mountains was over at last, leaving the
immigrant party at liberty, now that
danger from mountain storm and pros
pective starvation no longer menaced
them, to find homes wherever inclina-
tion might prompt them to settle.
The Territory being at that time al
most wholly uninhabited by whites,
with the exception of the military sta
tion at Vancouver, the Hudson Bay
Company's trading posts at Astoria and
Oregon City, and the rural homes of a
few white men, mostly French, who
had Indian wives, there was no lack of
the beautiful and fertile public domain
from which to choose a residence.
The provisional government, formed
by few hOnest-hearted pioneers, whose
Democratic simplicity would put to
shame a whole army of such party
tricksters as have recently made the
name of Oregon a synonym for political
fraud, was the only code of civil law,
and the people were correspondingly
honest and honorable in their dealings
with each other.
1t is a curious fact that venture to
throw in sight here, as a hint to the
philosopher whose reflections may be
awakened by the thought, that crime
and peculation multiply in proportion
as the means known to civilization for
Furnishing and preventing the same are
multiplied. The increased supply of
courts, judges, jurors, and barristers
stimulates the increased supply of GRIM
inals, debtors, and petty offenders, just
as the constantly increasing supply of
elegant furnishing goods of every de-
scription exhibited in the stores as con-
stantly increases the demand for ex-
travagant display among those who are
exposed to the temptation to crafty
tastes that would otherwise lie dormant.
Were it not that every evil in time
works out its own cure, just as air or
water will purify itself if time enough
is given, there is no imagining the re-
finement of political, legal, and finan-
cial chaos which humanity would fl
nally reach in its endeavor to compete
with itself, either in crime or cupidity.
The gold mines attracted border ruff
ans, but vigilance committees put a
speedy quietus upon their depredations.
To-day, under higher system of civili-
zation, the man who plays the part of
the refined border ruffian buys his way
into the United States Senate from the
very localities where, quarter of CEN
tury ago, when the refinements of civil
law were not in use, a man who wronged
his neighbor was made to eXpiate his
misdemeanor from the lateral branch of
a mammoth tree.
The Marbleheads and the Jones fam
lily came to Oregon long before the pas
sage of the Donation Land Law. They
were not limited in their possessions to
a square mile, or even ten miles square,
of virgin soil. "All out of doors" lay
before them, covered to the very hill
tops with luxuriant grass, and again
studded, here, there, and almost every
where, with tall dark forests of fir, and
outrageous groves of scattering oaks,
the mountains, hills, and dales alike re-
joicing in a wealth of green, over which
purple clouds flOated lazily, while hoary,
majestic, historic Hood arose in solitary
grandeur from his eternal throne of
rocks and gazed abroad upon the mighty
scene with the complaceney that char
acterized him as a mountain monarch
while yet the behemoth rioted in the
antedeluvian marshes that once mired
at his feet.
do not suppose the Marbleheads and
Joneses thought much upon the prehis-
toric probabilities, and these cogitations
of mine may seem irrelevant to the sub
ject in hand, but they please the writer,
who is supposed to have some rights in
the premises, therefore they are some
times thrown in as rhapsodies. No
where else in all North America have ]
ever found such theme for fancy as the
physical geography of Oregon presents
to the naturalist, theorist, dreamer, OIL
moralist.
To follow Martha Marblehead and heI
ascetic paternal progenitor through the
unpoetic plodding of everyday existence
is task compared to which descriptive
geography, presumptive history or as
sumptive theology is as child's play,
Humanity, the writer included, ERoaO,
so Very little that we all find it easier fol
the compiler of religious anecdotes fol
the use of the American Tract Society,
the maker of correct representations
about the weather for patent medicine
almanac or the writer of ordinary facts
to deal in the faneiful than the real, the
assumed than the demonstrated.
I have undertaken the very difficult
task of writing a story of which the
main incidents are true, and yet I an
endeavoring to so confine facts, times
and places that the average reader may
not guess at the personality of any o
my characters, even while their owr
common sense will assure them that