Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/204

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James K. Kelly.

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.

Although the Oregon Code, as it was then termed, has since been revised two or three times to adapt it to a state, instead of a territorial government, yet in its main features it has remained substantially the same as when prepared by the first code commissioners and adopted by the legislative assembly of 1853-54.

The commissioners who prepared the first code of Oregon are all still living [1894], but nearly all the members of the legislature that adopted it are gone. Besides Judge Boise and myself I can think of no one of them who is now living.

JAMES K. KELLY.

September 25, 1894.