Not long after the meeting at Oregon City, a public gathering of about two hundred was convened at Salem for the purpose of expressing disapproval of the resolutions passed at the Oregon City meeting, and commendation of the cause of the Oregon delegate.[1]
In November a meeting was held in Linn county at which resolutions were passed endorsing Thurston and denouncing McLoughlin. Nor were there wanting those who upheld the delegate privately, and who wrote approving letters to him, assuring him that he was losing no friends, but gaining them by the score, and that his course with regard to the Oregon City claim would be sustained.[2]
Mr Thurston has been since condemned for his action in the matter of the Oregon City claims. But even while the honest historian must join in reprobat-
- ↑ William Shaw, a member of the committee framing these resolutions, says, in his Pioneer Life, MS., 14–15: 'I came here, to Oregon City, and spent what money I had for flour, coffee, and one thing and another; and I went back to the Hudson's Bay Company and bought 1,000 pounds of flour from Douglass. I was to pay him for it after I came into the Valley. He trusted me for it, although he had never seen me before. I took it up to the Dalles and distributed it among the emigrants.' W. C. Rector has, in later years, declared that McLoughlin was the father of Oregon. McLoughlin little understood the manner in which public sentiment is manufactured for party or even for individual purposes, when he exclaimed indignantly: 'No man could be found to assert' that he had done the things alleged.
- ↑ Odell's Biog. of Thurston, MS., 26.
unsuccessful agent of the leading missionaries in an effort to take away the claim of McLoughlin, it might be difficult to understand how he could appear in the role of the doctor's defender. But ever since the failure of that secret mission there had been a coolness between Abernethy and his private delegate, who, now that he had been superseded by a bolder and more fortunate though no less unscrupulous man, had publicly espoused the cause of the victim of all this plotting, who still, it was supposed, had means enough left to pay for the legal advice he was likely to need, if ever he was extricated from the anomalous position into which he would be thrown by the passage of the Oregon land bill. His affectation of proper sentiment imposed upon McLoughlin, who gave him employment for a considerable time. As late as 1870. however, this doughty defender of the just, on the appearance in print of Mrs Victor's River of the West, in which the author gives a brief statement of the Oregon City claim case, having occasion at that time to court the patronage of the Methodist church, made a violent attack through its organ, the Pacific Christian Advocate, upon the author of that book for taking the same view of the case which is announced in the resolution published under his own name in the Spectator of September 26, 1850. But not having ever been able to regain in the church a standing which could be made profitable, and finding that history would vindicate the right, he has made a request in his autobiography that the fact of his having been McLoughlin's attorney should be mentioned, 'in justice to the doctor!' It will be left for posterity to judge whether Thornton or McLoughlin was honored by the association.
