The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 1, No. 3, September, 1900Oregon Historical Society
History
The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 1, No. 3, September, 1900
Oregon Historical Society
Oregon -- History -- Periodicals
getting into the power of the law for knifing a woman in a camp fray,
would appeal to Joe, as chief, for financial help, with no more sense of
shame than an Irish landlord who had wasted his property in riotous
living would have in spunging off his former tenants to a green old age.
There are many people of the white race who cannot help being
participants in the results of the change of racial dominion which has
taken place on the North Pacific Slope within the past century. They
feel they are participants in a gigantic act of robbery. A lady whose
writings on any subject it is a delight to read, in the June number of
the Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, shows the origin of land
titles so far as the English race of men have made them. It would be an
instructive addition to her able paper if some one, well read on the
effects of guarded land titles in sufficient area to support family life
on each allotment, would describe their influences upon a community so
blessed.
Already enough has been said to indicate that prior to the visit of
Lewis and Clark, the native race was in a condition of decline; that in
a normal or average season a body of forty men, or less, found it
difficult to avoid starvation while moving from place to place in a
country estimated to contain forty thousand.
It may be admitted, because it is true though shameful, that the
licentiousness of trade had sown the seeds accelerating the decay of the
native race in Western Oregon, from the Columbia River to the Umpqua,
and from its mouth to Fort Hall. Within these bounds, but especially
near the chief lines of commerce, the missionary even had as much need
of a medical book as he had of his bible, as far as the people he had
come to guide in the way of life was concerned.
Abundant reason had Dr. John McLoughlin (that living copy of the great
heart of Bunyan’s matchless fancy) for giving welcome to the American
missionaries. He knew the value of a clean mind or soul in keeping a
clean and healthy body; though with a wise physican’s care he kept the
hospital at Vancouver open to any white sick, whom the resident doctor
the Hudson’s Bay Company maintained there recommended to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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