The legislative assembly met on the first Monday in December, and after the respective houses were organized Mr. Boise was appointed chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the lower house, while I was appointed chairman of the same committee in the upper branch of the legislature. Of course, the burden of seeing the code properly passed rested with him and myself. We divided the draft which the code commissioners had prepared into proper bills, according to the subject-matter of each. Some of these bills were introduced into the House of Representatives by Mr. Boise, and others of them into the Council by myself. All we had to do was simply to preface an enacting clause to the bill as it had been printed by order of the commissioners, and to insert a section at the end of each bill declaring that the act should be in force from and after the first of May next. The reason these acts were made to take effect on May 1, 1854, was that there was no possibility of having them printed before that time. Indeed, there were no facilities then existing in Oregon for either printing or binding the volume containing the statutes comprised in the first code. Mr. Bush, the territorial printer, made arrangements to have them printed and bound in New York. I do not now remember how many copies of the code were ordered to be printed, but certainly several hundred. About two hundred of these were sent to Oregon by way of Panama and arrived safely some time in the summer of 1854. The remaining copies of that edition were sent around Cape Horn by a sailing vessel. These never reached Oregon. They were either shipwrecked or so injured that they were worthless. At the next session of the legislative assembly, commencing in December, 1854, that body ordered a new edition to be printed to supply the place of the copies which were lost at sea, and that edition was printed in New York in 1855. It included the acts which were passed at that session with those of the code adopted at the preceding session of the legislature. This accounts for the printing of two editions--one in 1854 and another in 1855. Between May 1, 1854, when the code took effect and the arrival of the first copies of the printed volume from New York, we were somewhat troubled for want of evidence of existing statutes, and the judges and lawyers used in the courts copies of the printed draft reported by the code commissioners. A few of these unbound volumes still remained and such changes as had been made by the legislature were noted in them. Some of the lawyers even went to the trouble of having them indexed so as to be more convenient for reference and citation. When, however, the first copies of the code arrived from New York these unbound copies of the code commissioners' draft were thrown aside. One of them I kept as a time-honored curiosity for many years.