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72
OREGON LITERATURE.

mend—their implicit confidence in the title of their country to Oregon which they never failed to assert on every proper occasion, and so sure were they that it would be maintained, their patriotic avowal was that the government, they constituted their trusteeship of the territory, should only continue "until such time as the United States shall extend jurisdiction;"—their signal and undying love for republican institutions, breathing through every line of the fundamental code of the government they founded; or their eminent conservative wisdom as displayed in that system, the laws enacted and their administration. How truly

{{block center|"Each man made hig own stature, built himself:
Virtue alone outbids the pyramids,

Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall."

—Elwood Evans.


THE HOME BUILDERS.

A voyage of adventure brought not back the golden fleece, and the argonauts no longer poured over the Sierras into California, nor overflowed her northern hills to seek fugitive fortune in Oregon. The home-builders, too—blessings on them everywhere and forever!—whose caravans, freighted with the precious burden of wife and children and household goods, the lares and penates of a gentler than a Trojan race, had whitened the desert