page_title: Champoeg Meetings
section_title: Subsequent history
hierarchical_section_title: Champoeg Meetings / Subsequent history
caption_attribution_description: English: Provisional Government of Oregon seal.
context_page_description: The Champoeg Meetings were the first attempts at formal governance by European-American and French Canadian pioneers in the Oregon Country on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. Between 1841 and 1843, a series of public councils was held at Champoeg, a settlement on the French Prairie of the Willamette River valley in present-day Marion County, Oregon, and at surrounding settlements. The meetings were organized by newly arrived settlers as well as Protestant missionaries from the Methodist Mission and Catholic Jesuit priests from Canada.
  Since the first decade of the 19th century, a small but growing number of pioneers had settled in the Oregon Country, mostly to pursue business interests in the North American fur trade. Despite its economic value, the region was so vast and remote that it was left unorganized for several decades, with no European-American government in place to set laws and resolve disputes. Prior to the Champoeg Meetings, the closest thing to a government in the Oregon Country was the privately owned Hudson's Bay Company, which effected a loose authority mainly through the efforts of Dr.
context_section_description: The Provisional Government of Oregon originally hardly functioned due to various limitations upon its power, but after the adoption of the second Organic Code in 1845, its control over the Willamette Valley was solidified. It eventually established taxes, built roads, authorized ferries, passed laws, and even waged war against some Native American tribes in the Cayuse War following the Whitman Massacre. Oregon's pioneers considered this government framework that was installed by the adopted Organic Laws of Oregon to be their first constitution, although in 1844 the legislative committee specifically ruled the organic laws statutory rather than constitutional. Negotiations with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1845 expanded the provisional government's jurisdiction north of the Columbia River, its officers continuing to run the majority of the civil affairs in the newly created Vancouver district. In 1846, the boundary dispute with Great Britain was settled, which reduced the area claimed by the provisional government to that territory south of the 49th degree of latitude. A new territorial government was formed after 1848 when Oregon was organized as an official United States territory. The presidentially appointed governor of the Oregon Territory, Joseph Lane, arrived March 3, 1849, and he officially ended the provisional government by declaring that U.S. laws and government were in effect over the territory. Oregon later entered the Union as the 33rd U.S. state, on February 14, 1859.
caption: Seal of the Provisional Government of Oregon
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