although the most important or latest acts were published in the newspapers, and a volume of statutes was printed and bound at Oregon City in 1851. It was not until January 1853 that the assembly provided for the compilation of the laws, and appointed L. F. Grover commissioner to prepare for publication the statutes of the colonial and territorial governments from 1843 to 1849 inclusive. The result of the commissioner's labors is a small book often quoted in these pages as Or. Laws, 1843–9, of much value to the historian, but which, nevertheless, needs to be confirmed by a close comparison with the archives compiled and printed at the same time, and with corroborative events; the dates appended to the laws being often several sessions out of time, either guessed at by the compiler, or mistaken by the printer and not corrected. In many cases the laws themselves are mere abstracts or abbreviations of the acts published in the Spectator.[1]
Nor were the archives collected any more complete, as boxes of loose papers, as late as 1878, to my knowledge, were lying unprinted in the costly state-house at Salem. Many of them have been copied for my
- ↑ Public Life in Oregon is one of the most scholarly and analytical contributions to history which I was able to gather during my many interviews of 1878. Besides being in a measure a political history of the country, it abounds with life-like sketches of the public men of the day, given in a clear and fluent style, and without apparent bias. L. F. Grover, the author, was born at Bethel, Maine, Nov. 29, 1823. He came to California in the winter of 1850, and to Oregon early in 1851. He was almost immediately appointed clerk of the first judicial district by Judge Nelson. He soon afterward received the appointment of prosecuting attorney of the second judicial district, and became deputy United States district attorney, through his law partner, B. F. Harding, who held that office. Thereafter for a long period he was in public life in Oregon. Grover was a protegé of Thurston, who had known him in Maine, and advised him when admitted to the bar in Philadelphia to go to Oregon, where he would take him into his own office as a law-partner; but Thurston dying, Grover was left to introduce himself to the new commonwealth, which he did most successfully. Grover's Pub. Life in Or., MS., 100–3; Yreka Union, April 1, 1870.
Among men inclined from the condition of society to early marriages, as I have before mentioned, the wording of the donation law stimulated the desire to marry in order to become lord of a mile square of land, while it influenced women to the same measure, as it was only a wife or widow who was entitled to 320 acres. Many unhappy unions were the consequence, and numerous divorces. Deady's Hist. Or., MS., 33; Victor's New Penelope, 19–20.
