Jesse Applegate then says, in this letter, that he was present in 1845 when Dr. McLoughlin applied to Judge Peter H. Burnett, the Chief Justice of the Provisional Government, to take the oath of allegiance to the United States and to obtain first naturalization papers, but Judge Burnett declined to grant the request for he believed he did not have any jurisdiction to do so. Jesse Applegate further said in his letter: "That 'you pulled down houses and turned women and children out of them,' is a charge not only false, but too absurd to require refutation or notice. I can myself state, from experience, which accords with that of every other destitute immigrant who applied to you for assistance, either before or since my arrival in the country, that your conduct was entirely the reverse. My own company, of more than seventy persons, mostly women and children, who arrived at Vancouver in the storms of winter, in a condition the most destitute and miserable, were received by you, not as strangers, or foreigners, or as some would have it, enemies, but as brethren and fit subjects of hospitality and Christian charity, and our reception was not more kind and generous than was extended to every immigrant who sought your hospitality or assistance.... But however unjust the Oregon Land Law has been towards you, it may be said in excuse for the members of Congress who passed it, that with the concurring and uncontradicted evidence of the Delegate and Chief Justice of Oregon before them, you neither _had_ nor _would_ become an American citizen, they are not chargeable with injustice."[53] _The Persecution Continued._