trading establishments located at the upper and lower falls; and in fact, the map of that portion of Oregon north of the Columbia had marked upon it in the spring of 1852 nearly every important point which is seen there to-day.
Of the general condition of the country south of the Columbia at the period of the division, something may be here said, as I shall not again refer to it in a particular manner. The population, before the addition of the large immigration of 1852, was about twenty thousand, most of whom were scattered over the Willamette Valley upon farms. The rage for laying out towns, which was at its height from 1850 to 1853, had a tendency to retard the growth of any one of them.[1] Oregon City, the oldest in the territory, had not much over one thousand inhabitants. Portland, by reason of its advantages for unloading shipping, had double that number. The other towns, Milwaukie, Salem, Corvallis, Albany, Eugene, Lafayette, Dayton, and Hillsboro, and the newer ones in the southern valleys, could none of them count a thousand.[2]
- ↑ Joel Palmer bought the claim of Andrew Smith, and founded the town of Dayton about 1850. Lafayette was the property of Joel Perkins, Corvallis of J. C. Avery, Albany of the Monteith brothers, Eugene of Eugene Skinner, Canyonville of Jesse Roberts, who sold it to Marks, Sideman & Co., who laid it out for a town.
- ↑ A town called Milwaukie was surveyed on the claim of Lot Whitcomb. It contained 500 inhabitants in the autumn of 1850, more than it had thirty years later. Or. Spectator, Nov. 28, 1850. Deady, in Overland Monthly, i. 37. Oswego, on the west bank of the Willamette, later famous for its iron-works, was laid out about the same time, but never had the population of Milwaukie, of which it was the rival. Dallas, in Polk county, was founded in 1852. St Helen, on the Columbia, was competing for the advantage of being the seaport of Oregon, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company had decreed that so it should be, when the remonstrances, if not the sinister acts, of Portland men effected the ruin of ambitious hopes. St Helen was on the land claim of H. M. Knighton, an immigrant of 1845, and had an excellent situation. Weed's Queen Charlotte Isl. Exp., MS., 7. 'Milton and St Helen, one and a half miles apart, on the Columbia, had each 20 or 25 houses…. Gray, a Dane, was the chief founder of St Helen.' Saint- Amant, Voyages en Cal. et Or., 368–9, 378. It was surveyed and marked out in lots and blocks by P. W. Crawford, assisted by W. H. Tappan, and afterward mapped by Joseph Trutch, later of Victoria, B. C. A road was laid out to the Tualatin plains, and a railroad projected; the steamship company erected a wharf with other improvements. But meetings were held in Portland to prevent the
