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Gary Halvorson, State Archives “We’ll All Start Even”

White Egalitarianism and the Oregon

KENNETH R. COLEMAN

THIS MURAL, located in the northwest corner of the rotunda, depicts John In Oregon, as in other parts of the world, theories of White superiority did not McLoughlin (center) of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) welcoming Presbyterian missionaries guarantee that Whites would reign at the top of a racially satisfied world order. and Eliza Spalding to in 1836. Early Oregon land bills were That objective could only be achieved when those theories were married to a partly intended to reduce the HBC’s influence in the region. machinery of implementation. In America during the nineteenth century, the key to that eventuality was a social-political system that tied economic and political power to land ownership. Both the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 and the 1857 Oregon Constitution provision barring Blacks from owning real Racist structures became ingrained in the resettlement of Oregon, estate guaranteed that Whites would enjoy a government-granted advantage culminating in the U.S. Congress’s passing of the DCLA.2 Oregon’s settler over non-Whites in the pursuit of wealth, power, and privilege in the pioneer colonists repeatedly invoked a Jacksonian vision of egalitarianism rooted in generation and each generation that followed. White supremacy to justify their actions, including entering a region where Euro-Americans were the minority and — without U.S. sanction — creating a government that reserved citizenship for White males.3 They used that govern- IN 1843, many of the Anglo-American farm families who immigrated to ment not only to validate and protect their own land claims, but also to ban the were animated by hopes of generous federal land the immigration of anyone of African ancestry. The DLCA was the only federal grants. During the 1830s, federal legislators had begun proposing bills that land-distribution act in U.S. history that specifically limited land grants by race, donated homesteads to (presumably armed) settlers as an inducement to essentially creating an affirmative action program for White people.4 Perhaps transform and protect the western frontier for the .1 In Oregon, most decisively, the issuance of free land resulted in a massive economic head which was not a part of the United States at the time, colonists claimed start for White cultivators and initiated a long-standing pattern in which access large tracts of land without official surveys and relied on a newly created to real estate became an instrument of White supremacy and social control. provisional government to legitimize those claims. When Oregon became This result would have immeasurable consequences for social inequality in an organized U.S. territory in 1848, Oregon politicians successfully lobbied Oregon, as emerging markets in privatized land were major engines of eco- the federal government to pass the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act (DLCA), nomic prosperity in the nineteenth-century United States and beyond. the most generous land distribution bill in U.S. history, legally confirming The lobbying efforts of Oregon’s early political leaders were so suc- the settlers’ original claims and granting future settlers an unprecedented cessful that Congress allowed the region’s Anglo-American settlers to seize 320 acres for White males or “half-breed” Indian males and 640 acres for Indigenous homelands without Tribes’ having ceded their lands through married couples. Such local and national legislation would have a major treaties with the federal government — a violation of U.S. law. The 1787 impact on economic development in Oregon and influence future national Northwest Ordinance was an expansionist document that provided a plan for land-distribution legislation. incorporating the Old Northwest into the United States, but it stipulated that

414 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 © 2019 Oregon Historical Society Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 415 the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians. Their which Great Britain ceded claim to its possessions below lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.”5 the forty-ninth parallel, the United States and Great Britain coexisted in an The U.S Constitution recognized Indian tribes as the legal equivalent of sov- awkward state of joint occupation. In 1792, both nations claimed sovereignty ereign nations with whom negotiations could occur only on a federal level, over Oregon according to the Doc- a concept affirmed in the 1848 Act to Establish the Territorial Government trine of Discovery, a legal formation OHS Research Library, OrHi 96907 of Oregon.6 By the early , the federal government had established a in which European nations — and three-step process to extinguish “Indian title.” The U.S. Senate would first later the United States — claimed appoint a treaty commission to negotiate with individual tribes. Once Con- possession of Indigenous land gress had ratified those negotiated treaties, a formal survey would measure based on the dubious notion of “dis- and transform land into delineated boxes on a map.7 Those boxes would covery.” American Robert Gray and form a public domain that the federal government could sell or donate. British George Vancouver had each Oregon’s early Anglo-American settlers and their political representatives, claimed discovery of the Columbia however, successfully pressured Congress to flip this formula on its head, River region in 1792, when they disregarding tribal rights to lands now occupied by squatters.8 Moreover, arrived at the mouth of the river on the DCLA, an exclusionary document steeped in White supremacy, treated separate sailing expeditions.13 The Oregon’s Indigenous inhabitants as an undifferentiated race or ethnic group absurdity of both claims is illustrated rather than as members of distinct, sovereign communities. by the fact that the lower Columbia White supremacy is the racist notion that people of European ancestry region was one of the most densely are biologically superior to people of non-European ancestry and therefore populated places in North America are entitled to rule over those non-Europeans. It is based on the concept of at the time.14 Colonizers often made race, which holds that nature separated human beings into supposedly leg- a distinction, however, between ible groupings. Race is an ideology, which Barbara J. Fields defines as “the occupied Indian land (such as village descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make sites) and unoccupied land.15 Such rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day.”9 “unoccupied” land often included MISSOURI SENATOR Lewis F. Linn championed a series of bills in Congress that offered free Race has no basis in biology. It is a social formation that arose from specific essential horticultural, hunting, and Oregon land to lure potential settlers. Linn’s 1843 historical circumstances. In the American colonies, White supremacy served to gathering grounds. This erasure bill provided inspiration for the first major wagon legitimate the existence of an economic system — chattel slavery — that con- enabled squatters — settlers occu- train migration of that same year. tradicted the emerging enlightenment ideologies of natural rights and liberty, pying lands without legal title — to including the insistence that all men were created equal. In 1894, historian Lyon envision themselves as the rightful Gardiner Tyler attributed colonial America’s “democratic spirit” to the fact that owners of land already held and used in common, privatizing that land “negro slavery made race, and not class, the distinction in social life.”10 Racism before it was officially part of the U.S. public domain. also justified the removal of Indigenous communities and the seizure of their For the participants of the first major migration of 1843, no land. Race, like any ideology, requires reinforcement and reproduction through proposed legislation was more influential than the series of bills that Missouri daily rituals. By the Age of Jackson, the repetition of rituals of dominance and Democratic Senator Lewis F. Linn promoted from 1837 until his death in 1843. submission associated with slavery and Indian removal made the connection Linn, along with fellow Missouri Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton, between skin color and caste assume the appearance of objective truth for was the most prominent Oregon booster in Congress.16 By 1839, Linn called many Americans, resulting in Whites’ commonplace perceptions that those for granting an unprecedented 640 acres of free land to each White male of African ancestry were servile by nature and that Indigenous communities over the age of eighteen who made the arduous overland trek to Oregon.17 were unworthy to occupy their own lands.11 When members of Congress balked at the mammoth size of the grants, Linn Racism was a major factor in how the Oregon Country initially came to be justified them as rewards for those emigrants willing to risk the costly trip considered part of the United States.12 Prior to the of 1846, in to Oregon. After years of congressional indifference to Linn’s bills, his final

416 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 417 Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, : European Explorations and the . descendants of the Anglo-Saxon tribes of Europe were racially predisposed to spread democracy and freedom: “They but obeyed the instinct of our peculiar race — that invincible longing for liberty and space which impels those of Anglo-Saxon descent.”19 Like the DLCA, the earlier bills contained no provisions for extinguishing Indian title to Oregon lands prior to Anglo- American resettlement and included only the federal appointment of Indian agents to “superintend the interests of the United States.” Linn’s bills also called for military installations presumably to protect settlers from the region’s independent Indigenous communities.20 Linn argued that Oregon’s Natives acted in league with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the British joint-stock company that had been a de facto governing body in the region since 1821.21 The 1839 version of the bill openly called for the raising of a settler infantry “for the purpose of overawing and keeping in check various Indian tribes, or any foreign forces, who may be in said Territory.”22 In the spring of 1843, as the House dithered on Linn’s bill, hundreds of overland emigrants assembled in Independence, Missouri, to attempt the two-thousand-mile journey to the Oregon Country. The wagon train comprised predominately Anglo-Protestant farm families from the Old Northwest and the Border States.23 Although word soon reached Independence that Linn’s efforts had failed, most decided to risk the trip anyway. One such emigrant was the initial leader of the 1843 wagon train, Missourian Peter H. Burnett. Burnett believed the bill would ultimately pass and estimated that his extended fam- ily would net 1,600 acres of free land.24 Another prominent emigrant, , advised his brother to beat the rush: “If you are going to Orregon [sic] by all means go this spring for if Linn’s Bill pass next year every man and BETWEEN 1805 AND 1806, over thirty members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled every man’s neighbors and friends will move in that direction.”25 into the basin. In journal entries and maps, drawn primarily by Capt. William Clark, Expedition members documented the geography of the area as well as interactions with In the spring of 1843, as the overlanders traveled west, a relatively small Indigenous people. This detail of an 1814 map, reproduced from Clark’s 1804–1806 sketches, group of male residents of Oregon — comprising mostly American colonists, illustrates the region’s typography as well as Native Tribes and populations, indicated by the Methodist missionaries and laymen, and a handful of retired French-Canadian number of “souls.” According to this detail area alone, tens of thousands Indigenous people lived fur industry workers — scrambled to create an American-style government in the region at the time of the Expedition. in anticipation of the population increase.26 On July 5, the provisional government adopted its Organic Laws, based on laws of Territory, as Linn recommended, and preserving most of the contours of Linn’s 1843 bill, iteration narrowly passed the Senate in February 1843, only to be defeated including 640-acre land grants to settlers. The centerpiece of the Organic in the House. Several lawmakers cited fears that the bill would jeopardize Laws was the , designed to create a system to record and protect relations with Great Britain by violating the joint occupation agreement in land claims without official surveys. Instead, claimants were merely asked the Anglo-American Convention of 1818.18 to “designate the extent of his claim by natural boundaries, or by marks at Linn’s failed bills had specific White supremacist implications, most of the corners and upon the lines of said claim.”27 In 1845, the provisional gov- which were later reproduced in the DLCA. First, Linn limited claimants to ernment established a land office that had no capacity to formally survey White males. He argued for those proposed claimants in an 1843 speech, in land.28 As John Suval has argued, the provisional government essentially which he cited the common nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific notion that operated as a claim club, a private-order association of squatters estab-

418 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 419 lished as a means to seize land and then pressure the federal government cally and philosophically preferable to slave labor).38 Politically, the majority of to honor those claims.29 According to Ilia Murtazashvili, “claim clubs, rather Oregon settlers were anti-slavery supporters of the Democratic Party — they than spontaneously arising norms or an all-powerful state, were the most embraced White egalitarianism and were opposed to a hierarchical social order important initial source of private property institutions as individuals fanned ruled by political, economic, or intellectual elites.39 They looked to Oregon out across the nation’s vast lands during the nineteenth century.”30 as a place where cultivators could escape rising class distinctions. Thurston The framers of the provisional government and its later members drew wrote of Oregon: “Aristocracy finds

strict racial boundaries to create and preserve a White, male social order. They there a poor dwelling-place, and a OHS Research Library, Org. Lot 500, box 1, folder ba000159 limited suffrage to every free, male descendent of a White man. This feature republican equality is the presiding granted citizenship to the sons of Euro-American fur industry workers who had genius of the land.” They opposed married Indigenous women, but it also disenfranchised the majority of people the extension of slavery beyond the residing in Oregon at the time. In 1844, the provisional government’s legisla- South on self-interested economic, tive committee passed a law declaring that “when any free negro or mulatto rather than moral, grounds — settlers shall have come to Oregon, he or she . . . shall remove from and leave the did not want to compete with land- country.”31 Those Black women or men who refused to leave within the allotted owners who utilized enslaved labor. period would be subject to flogging. Burnett, who wrote the law, framed it as Robert Wilson Morrison, who arrived an act to prevent slavery. This was an obvious misnomer, however, because in Oregon with the 1844 migration, the provisional government had already banned slavery from Oregon in 1843. invoked the antislavery, free labor There was nothing particularly unique about Oregon’s Black exclusion law. ideology when he declared, “I’m Similar laws restricting free Black people from residing in states, territories, or going to Oregon, where there’ll be localities could be found in virtually every region of the United States, including no slaves, and we’ll all start even.”40 most of the places from which many overlanders emigrated.32 Even the call for Northern advocates of the “free flogging, which some contemporary Oregon residents found distasteful, had labor” ideology were often White historical precedent.33 At least one organizing company of the Oregon Trail supremacists who believed the pres- migration banned Black and “Mulatto” emigrants from traveling with them.34 ence of any Black people — enslaved Oregon’s anti-Black law was unusual, however, considering that very few or free — would introduce a servile Black people lived in the region and there was little sign of imminent Black underclass, undercutting White PETER H. BURNETT emigrated from Missouri immigration. Burnett conflated race with class when he argued that banning laborers. to Oregon in 1843 and served in Oregon’s Black immigration would preserve agrarian egalitarianism in Oregon: “The Oregon politicians knew the provisional government. In 1844, he authored object is to keep clear of this most troublesome class of population. . . . we racially inscribed claim club they had Oregon’s first Black exclusion law. wish to avoid most of these great evils that have so much afflicted the United created would fail if it did not enter States and other countries.”35 Applegate offered a more succinct explanation into a formal relationship with the U.S. for the law: “Many of those people hated slavery, but a much larger number of government. The first step occurred on , 1846, when the United States them hated free negroes worse even than slaves.”36 Many settlers likely were signed the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain and took full possession of the also familiar with the practice of slaveholders’ freeing their slaves on entering region south of the forty-ninth parallel. Although the provisional government a territory where slavery was illegal, only to continue working those people continued to operate, Oregon was now an unorganized territory with no legal under euphemistic forms of servitude such as indenture or apprenticeship.37 protection of land claims. In the fall of 1847, provisional governor George Aber- During the mid nineteenth century, Black exclusion and anti-slavery were nethy sent his government’s supreme judge, J. Quinn Thornton, to , often complementary. The redistribution of public land (almost always taken D.C., to urge Congress to recognize Oregon land titles as compensation for from sovereign Indian groups by the federal government) to cultivators had settlers’ sacrifice in claiming Oregon for the United States.41 Thornton’s peti- become one of the cornerstones of the anti-slavery, free labor ideology (the tion failed to make an impression in the nation’s capital, where lawmakers notion that the free labor of farmers, entrepreneurs, and artisans was economi- were distracted by the Mexican-American War and by fierce debates over the

420 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 421 the Indians in the course of next summer . . . settlement will be thrown open to the immigrant, and thus the first and prerequisite step will have been taken preparatory to the final disposition of the soil.”46 In late 1849, Thurston made the long journey to Washington, D.C., to fulfill his promises. Before he could secure settlers’ property rights, Thurston first needed to convince Congress to extinguish Indian title to all Oregon lands west of the Cascades and to remove any Indigenous communities residing therein. In 1849, the territorial had sent a memorial to Congress pleading Gary Halvorson, Gary Halvorson, Oregon State for Indian removal on both racial and humanitarian grounds: “The moral and civil interests of the white race, equally with the claims of humanity, require the removal of [Indians] to some place where . . . their condition may be 47 “THE GREAT WAGON TRAIN MIGRATION” MURAL is located in the northeast corner of the improved.” Thurston’s main obstacle was the 1848 Act to Establish the Orgegon State Capitol rotunda. It depicts overland settlers arriving at The Dalles in 1843. Territorial Government of Oregon itself, which stated “that nothing in this act contained shall be construed to impair the rights of person or property now pertaining to the Indians in said Territory, so long as such rights shall remain unextinguished by treaty between the United States and such Indi- extension of slavery to the western territories. On August 14, 1848, Oregon ans.” In January 1850, Thurston convinced lawmakers to introduce his bill finally became an organized U.S. territory, consisting of the future states of to extinguish Indian titles in Oregon and establish federal Indian agents and Oregon, Washington, and as well the sections of and agencies.48 On June 5, 1850, President Zachary Taylor signed Thurston’s west of the . But to the chagrin of Oregon political leaders, “Indian bill” into law, enabling the nomination of Oregon’s first superinten- Congress dissolved the provisional government without confirming the legality dent of Indian Affairs, Anson Dart.49 Dart was charged with negotiating with of settlers’ claims. The territorial act reproduced the provisional government’s Indigenous groups to void their claims to their lands. limitation of citizenship to adult White males, but it also required the federal Settlers now could lay claims without any Oregon Tribes actually having government to enter into treaties with local Tribes before settlers could claim ceded their land through a negotiated settlement. This abandonment of any Indian land.42 federal policy would have dire consequences for the Indigenous peoples The territorial act also allowed Oregon voters to send one non-voting del- of the Pacific Northwest. The value of tribal lands expropriated by settlers egate to represent them in Congress. The man they chose, Democrat Samuel can never be adequately assessed.50 Both the U.S. Constitution and the R. Thurston, did more than anyone to bend federal policy to favor Anglo-Amer- Northwest Ordinance of 1787 — on which both the 1843 Organic Laws and icans at the expense of non-White residents — then or in the future.43 Oregon’s the 1848 Oregon territorial act were based — established tribal sovereignty Anglo-American settlers, whom the territorial act now deemed squatters, had as U.S. law. In practice, Thurston’s land bill turned that formation on its head. more ambitious plans for Thurston — they hoped he would secure legal back- Settlers received massive grants of land held by legally recognized sover- ing for their land claims. Thurston’s project was informed by his own White eign nations — a clear violation of federal law. Even if settlers had wanted supremacist views. Like most Oregonians, Thurston’s anti-slavery stance was to purchase land from local Indigenous individuals, the U.S. Supreme Court, consistent with anti-Black Jacksonian egalitarianism: “I am ashamed that there in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), had banned such practices.51 Thurston’s land is one man in Oregon who would if he could curse Oregon by the introduction bill ignored legal precedent by completely dismissing any concept of tribal of a servile race whose presence would at once blast the very heart of our sovereignty. Its only mention of the word Indians is in reference to the legal- prosperity — free white labor.”44 Thurston fervently endorsed the 1849 Black ity of “half-breed” Indians’ claiming land.52 exclusion law passed by Oregon’s territorial legislature, framing it as a “ques- While promoting his Indian bill, Thurston put the finishing touches on his tion of life and death to us in Oregon.”45 He also assured his constituents that crowning achievement — the DLCA. Referred to the House’s Public Land he would convince Congress to extinguish Indian title to Oregon lands and committee on April 22, 1850, Thurston’s bill was familiar to anyone acquainted entirely remove Indigenous communities from the region: “we shall get rid of with the land law of Oregon’s provisional government.53 The bill called for a

422 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 423 Royal BC Museum, Item I-67874 320-acre land grant to each White male or “American half-breed” who had requirements: “It would give resided in the territory prior to December 1, 1850, and for an additional 320- land to every servant of the acre grant to spouses. The inclusion of Indigenous men with White fathers Hudson’s Bay Company, includ- likely reflects the political influence of Euro-American settlers — former fur ing some hundreds of Canakers, traders and trappers — who had married Indigenous women in Oregon. or Sandwich Islanders, who are Such men, many of whom had helped create the provisional government, a race of men as black as your Image removed due 54 did not want their heirs denied land claims. White males who arrived in the negroes of the South, and a to rights restriction territory after 1850 but before December 1, 1853 (later extended by amend- race, too, that we do not desire ment to 1855), could claim 160 acres; if they had wives, they would receive to settle in Oregon.”61 Thurston an additional 160 acres. To discourage land speculators, the bill required was referring to the Pacific claimants to cultivate the land for a minimum of four years before the land Islanders who had lived and office would confirm their claims. The bill also required the appointment of worked around Fort Vancouver a surveyor general and Oregon’s first official land survey.55 since the 1820s.62 By likening Thurston’s wife Elizabeth later hailed the DLCA as an advance in gender Pacific Islanders to Black people relations: “This surely was a woman’s Rights Bill.”56 Her assessment was based on skin tone, Thurston based on the grants to claimants’ wives, although individual or single women revealed typical nineteenth- were exempt. An 1853 amendment to the law honored the claims of widows century racialism in which super- whose husbands had died during or after the arduous journey to Oregon.57 ficial phenotypic attributes were Richard H. Chused, a legal scholar, has argued that the DLCA, as federal supposed to carry deep sig- legislation, is unusual in this regard; he contends this feature was due, in nificance. Thurston claimed he 58 part, to “the perceived need to attract women to a distant territory.” Chused, did not necessarily have Black WILLIAM KAULEHELEHE, pictured with his wife Mary however, failed to recognize the racial implications of this feature. There was people in mind, because the ter- Kaai, was among the many Hawaiians employed by the no shortage of women in Oregon relative to anywhere else in the West — but ritory had already banned Black HBC at Fort Vancouver. Kaulehelehe was recruited in there was a perceived shortage of White women. And because only women immigration in 1849. He added, 1845 to minister to Kanaka (Pacific Islander) laborers. married to White men (or Native men with White fathers) could qualify, the “I am obedient to the wish of DLCA would encourage the ethnic homogenization of the region and further my constituents, and hence am marginalize non-White women. The increasing number of White women in opposed to donations to negroes of any grade.”63 Oregon also allowed promoters of racial exclusion to exploit fears that non- Thurston, perhaps sensing that prejudice alone would not convince leg- Whites in the region posed a sexual threat to the wives and daughters of islators to exclude non-White land claimants, raised the stakes by exploiting Anglo-American settlers.59 Thurston’s bill did present a loophole in which fears of race mixing. He insisted that “the Canakers and negroes, if allowed non-White wives of White husbands could theoretically possess their own to come there, will commingle with our Indians, a mixed race will ensue, land in the event of their husband’s deaths, and in the 1854 case Vandolf and the result will be wars and bloodshed in Oregon.”64 Thurston echoed v. Otis, the territorial Supreme Court recognized an Indigenous woman’s the language of the 1849 territorial Black exclusion law: “Whereas situated property rights due to her marriage to a White man.60 as the people of Oregon are, in the midst of an Indian population, it would On May 28, 1850, members of Congress began debating the DLCA. Almost be highly dangerous to allow free negroes and mulattoes to reside in the immediately, the topic of race arose. Thurston insisted that he inserted the Territory, or to intermix with the Indians, instilling into their minds feelings exclusionary aspects of the bill to prevent HBC employees, whom he insisted of hostility against the white race.”65 While local Natives did not need Black were aligned with British interests, to claim land. Thurston claimed he would people to inform them that the growing presence of Anglo-American set- support giving land to any White foreign cultivator, “provided he likes our tlers was problematic, the recent Second Seminole War may have inspired Government well enough to become a citizen.” But he objected to the racial such sentiments. That costly war, in which Seminole fighters joined forces implication of any amendment that would strip away racial and citizenship with runaway slaves and their mixed-race descendants (sometimes known

424 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 425 OHS Research Library, Mss 1501, box 1, land tax folder as Black Seminoles) to resist forced removal by the U.S. Army, lasted over six years.66 In 1849, Oregon residents were also still reeling from the 1847 Whitman Incident and ensuing , although neither involved Black people.67 The only recorded incident of Black-Native collaboration in Oregon involved James D. Saules, a Black mariner who allegedly incited a group of Clackamas men to assault a White settler.68 Thurston failed to convince at least two Whig congressmen, New York’s William A. Sackett and Ohio’s Joshua R. Giddings. During House debates, Sackett decried any legislation that “discriminates in regard to color” and told Thurston that Oregon’s territorial statutes should have no bearing on a national land distribution bill.69 Sackett countered the prevailing notion that skin color equated with citizenship, strongly implying that he considered non- White Americans as “a portion of the citizens of this country.”70 Giddings had THIS TAX RECEIPT, issued to James Richter Pool(e) for his Yamhill County land claim, is dated October similar reservations over Thurston’s bill, arguing that the federal government 9, 1850. According to the Donation Land Claim Act, single men who arrived in Oregon prior to December 1, owed Black Americans redress because it “brought them by violence and 1850, could claim as many as 320 acres. wrong from their native country.”71 He then castigated Thurston for crafting a bill that would grant free land to native-born White members of Tammany Hall–affiliated street gangs “while Frederick Douglas [sic], a man of high moral worth, of great intellectual power, of unrivalled eloquence . . . is to be introduction of the Compromise of 1850 and with the 1854 Kansas- excluded, rudely driven from that region.”72 Ohio Democrat David K. Cartter Act, the latter of which ignited a sectional controversy over the extension of rose to Thurston’s defense, theorizing that southern slave-owners would slavery to the West and put a temporary pause on . see Oregon as a safety valve to unload “their worthless, worn out, and The DLCA influenced later land-distribution legislation, most notably the decrepit slaves.”73 Cartter then employed the familiar tactic of connecting 1862 Homestead Act. Like the Homestead Act, the DLCA stipulated that the democracy with Anglo-Saxon heritage: “If this continent is destined to be federal government would make land grants directly to settlers, rather than the home of free democracy and the legitimate inheritance of the Anglo- through the territorial government. To prevent speculation, the Homestead Saxon blood — the only relief is obtained, by a total separation of domicile Act, like the DLCA, required that settlers take an oath to live on and cultivate between the two races.”74 the land and, then, prove to two witnesses that they had met requirements Thurston ultimately carried the day. The House held two separate votes for residency and cultivation.78 Notably, however, the Homestead Act prom- regarding the question of who would qualify for land grants, voting 69 to 51 to ised settlers only 160 acres (320 for married couples) and dispensed with insert the word “white” into the bill and 77 to 38 to insert the words “American any racial requirements, although some lawmakers had tried to add racial half-breeds included.”75 The DLCA eventually passed both the House and exclusion to earlier iterations of the bill.79 Unlike the DCLA, the act also Senate with minor adjustments, and President Millard Fillmore signed the bill enabled single or widowed women to apply for homesteads. The Homestead on September 27, 1850. Despite the reluctance of some southern lawmakers Act excluded non-citizens, which included non-White immigrants and most to encourage the growth of a free territory and other lawmakers’ questions Indigenous peoples.80 This stipulation would have also prevented Black about why Congress should single out Oregon for special treatment, Thur- Americans from claiming land, as the 1857 Dred Scott decision declared ston and the Oregon political interests he represented ultimately received them non-citizens. In 1862, however, Attorney General Edward Bates partially everything they wanted. Congress confirmed their generous claims without overturned the Dred Scott decision by declaring free Blacks as citizens. At a formal survey and established racial exclusion in Oregon as federal law.76 the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of Black Americans lived in the The bill’s success was probably due to the fact that Whigs and Democrats had South, and few had the means or inclination to claim western homesteads.81 accepted that granting public lands to settlers was a popular issue with voters Instead, freed people in the South pushed for the redistribution of land of both parties.77 This notion, however, grew much more controversial with the confiscated from slaveholders to formerly enslaved people. Despite some

426 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 427 early successes, southern planters retained enough influence in the federal with the Indigenous communities living within Washington and Oregon.91 government to crush that land-reform movement.82 By 1859, the Senate had ratified most of the treaties Stevens and Palmer The DLCA had a profound impact on Oregon demographics and eco- had drafted (both combined and individually) with Tribes in Washington and nomic development. Anglo-American settlers and a handful of Natives with southern, western, and .92 Historian Francis Paul Prucha has White fathers received 7,317 land certificates, privatizing over 2.5 million described much of this process as more imposition than negotiation, noting acres of Oregon land. An 1854 amendment extended the act to the newly “there was little indication [in the treaties] that two sovereign equals were created , where settlers claimed an additional 300,000 negotiating.”93 In exchange for ceding the vast majority of their ancestral acres.83 When the bill expired in 1855, Oregon’s total recorded population lands to the federal government acting as proxy for White settlers, Pacific had mushroomed from 13,000 to 52,000.84 Yet, the bill stunted economic Northwest Tribes were promised military protection, hunting and fishing growth in Oregon, as the issuance of enormous land grants led to a diffused rights, annuity payments, and agricultural and industrial education.94 and isolated agrarian population with little access to larger markets. The act There is evidence that the effects of the DLCA may have rendered racial also discouraged urban migrants from relocating to Oregon, since the DLCA exclusion laws superfluous in the minds of many Oregon politicians. In 1854, excluded towns and cities from its coverage.85 In an autobiographical novel, a clerical error resulted in the accidental repeal of the 1849 Black exclusion — whose family immigrated to Oregon in 1852 — had law. The legislature rushed to pass a replacement, with one house member a character lament this effect: “If Uncle Sam had given us no more than 160[ invoking a Jacksonian interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as acres], we would all be better off in five years in the way of schools, society, “a declaration of the equality of free citizenship for white men.” Yet, surpris- and improvement.”86 In addition, historians Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats ingly, the legislature resoundingly voted down replacement bills in 1855 and argue that the DLCA exacerbated economic inequality in Oregon, since 1856. One reason lawmakers cited was that Black exclusion was unnecessary earlier settlers could not only claim the most productive farm land, but they because most Black migrants, without the lure of free land, would prefer were also entitled to grants twice the size of later claimants.87 the urban attractions of bustling California over agrarian, isolated Oregon.95 Thurston’s proposed policy to remove the Indigenous tribes of Democratic politician Delazon Smith, himself an outspoken racist, Oregon to the area east of the Cascades mountain range — an obvious voted against the 1855 Black exclusion bill on these grounds. Other lawmakers example of ethnic cleansing — was not initiated until 1851, when the Willa- argued that the Black exclusion bill would discourage commercial opportuni- mette Valley Treaty Commissioners drafted a total of six treaties with bands of ties in an overwhelmingly agrarian territory, because it required captains of the and . To the consternation of Congress, the negotiators ships entering Oregon to post $500 bonds for each Black mariner on board.96 failed to convince any Tribes to leave their homelands. Later that same year, Despite their efforts and flowery rhetoric, Oregon politicians and lawmak- Anson Dart, the newly appointed Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs, ers did not create an agricultural paradise devoid of class distinctions. This negotiated thirteen additional treaties with western Oregon Tribes, who project, if ever seriously considered, was probably dead on arrival when early agreed to cede over six million acres but again resisted removal to eastern settlers claimed the most marketable land in the region. The land grants they Oregon.88 The Senate refused to ratify any of the nineteen treaties, most secured from the federal government, furthermore, were easily privatized, likely because the Tribes would remain in western Oregon on reservations commodified, or stripped of marketable resources and abandoned. By 1900, that sometimes overlapped with preexisting donation land claims.89 By the most claims had been sold or mortgaged rather than bequeathed to descen- time news reached Oregon that the Senate had failed to ratify the treaties, dants.97 With the forced removal of Indigenous communities in western and many tribal members were already in the process of being forced off their , the federal government made additional land available to lands by ongoing settler encroachment on village locations, hunting and settlers. Like elsewhere in the United States, however, many would-be yeomen gathering grounds, horticultural sites, and fisheries.90 instead became tenants or wage laborers on commercial farms. In 1853, Congress authorized the creation of Washington Territory from By using real estate as a tool of racial exclusion, Oregon’s early political northern Oregon (including modern-day Idaho and parts of western Montana) leaders initiated a pattern that continued well into the twentieth century. The and, amid increasing violence as settlers and miners trespassed on tribal 1859 Oregon State Constitution, in addition to confirming White male suffrage lands, appointed Washington Governor Isaac Stevens and , Dart’s and reintroducing Black exclusion, banned Black and Chinese people from successor as Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to negotiate treaties owning real estate. In 1868, Oregon’s state legislature rescinded its initial

428 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 429 Library of Congress, Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1784–1894, U.S. Serial Set 4015

NATIVE LAND CEDED, YEAR 312: Indians (extends into California), 1853 313: Umpqua (Cow Creek Band), 1853 344: Umpqua and Calapooia, 1854 343: Chasta, Sco-ton, Grave Creek, 1854 352: Calapooia and Confederated Bands of , 1855 366 & 441: , 1855, 1863 (reservation 442 in Idaho) 362: Walla-walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla, 1855 369: Confederated Tribes of Middle Oregon, 1855 397: Coast Tribes of Oregon, 1855 (treaties never ratified but land ceded) 401: Molalla, 1855 444: Shoshoni (Western bands), 1863 462: Klamath and Modok, Yahooskin band of Snake Indians, 1864 474: Snake (Woll-pah-pe), 1865 479: Coast Tribes of Oregon, 1865 (originally set aside as reservation)

RESERVATION LAND, YEAR

363: Walla-walla, Cayuse, Umatilla, 1855 370: Confederated Tribes of Middle Oregon, 1855 407: Confederated Bands of Willamette Valley 463: Klamath and Modok, Yahooskin band of Snake Indians, 1864 578, 579, 479: Coast Tribes of Oregon, 1855

THIS MAP, published in the second volume of the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896–1897, documents Native land within present-day Oregon boundaries that was ceded to the U.S. government between 1853 and 1865. The numbered areas on the map correspond to a “Schedule of Indian Land Cessations” with information on the land location, treaties, and statutes associated with the land taking, and information on the Tribes who occupied the land. ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which Fayette Grover, The Oregon Archives: Including 2010); David R. Roediger, How Race Survived established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law regard- the Journals, Governors’ Messages and Public US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Papers of Oregon, from the Earliest Attempt on Obama Phenomenon (London: Verso, 2008). less of race, and refused to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which estab- the Part of the People to Form a Government, 12. Prior to the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the 98 lished universal male suffrage. Even as the successful passage of these Down To, and Inclusive of the Session of the Oregon Country, or what the Hudson’s Bay amendments superseded the most blatantly exclusionary legislation, banks Territorial Legislature Held in the Year 1849, Company (HBC) referred to as the Columbia and real estate companies later engaged in redlining, creating real estate Collected and Published Pursuant to an Act of District, comprised part of the future Canadian the Legislative Assembly, Passed Jan. 26, 1853 province of , the entire states covenants that segregated non-White homebuyers and renters to the least (Salem: , public printer, 1853), 29. of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and parts 99 desirable neighborhoods. Such tactics have widened the racial wealth gap 6. Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discov- of Montana and Wyoming. in Oregon, as segregation has meant disinvestment, ill-funded schools, and a ered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis 13. Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, The Pacific lack of remunerative employment. Victims of such policies include Oregon’s & Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Westport, Conn.: Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: Indigenous population, who were increasingly urbanized as a result of the Praeger, 2006), 158. University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 45–46. 7. Gray H. Whaley, Oregon and the Col- On the Doctrine of Discovery in the context 1954 Western Oregon Termination Act and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. lapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Trans- of the conquest of Oregon, see Miller, Native Recent efforts to invest in historically neglected Portland neighborhoods have formation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 America. favored profit-minded private interests over the communities themselves, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 14. Historians William L. Lang and Carl resulting in gentrification while doing little to combat segregation. Any seri- 2010), 182–83. Abbott claim that the population living along 8. Historian John Suval has used the term the Columbia estuary at the time of the Lewis ous attempt to challenge White supremacy in Oregon must engage with the “squatter” to describe settlers without legal title and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) — from the economic legacy of institutionalized racism limiting access to real estate and, to claimed land. Suval, “‘The Nomadic Race to Columbia Gorge to the Pacific — was one of the as such, wealth and social power. Which I Belong’,” 307. most densely populated regions in Indigenous 9. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race North America. According to estimates from and Ideology in the United States of America,” the 1805–1806 journals of Meriwether Lewis New Left Review 181:1 (May/June 1990): 110. and William Clark, the Chinookan population 10. Lyon G. Tyler, “Virginians Voting in the of the Lower Columbia region alone was as Colonial Period,” William and Mary Quarterly high as 17,840. Robert T. Boyd and Yvonne P. 6:1 (1897): 7–8. Hajda, “Seasonal Population Movement along NOTES 11. My contention that race is an ideology- the Lower Columbia River: The Social and -with specific historical roots--for purpose Ecological Context,” American Ethnologist 14:2 1. See the work of Paul Frymer for a dis- Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford Uni- of social control is informed by the work of (May 1987): 309–26. cussion on this change in land policy 1830s, versity Press, 1991), 127, 308–12, 386–87; Daniel Barbara J. Fields and Theodore W. Allen. For 15. M. Susan Van Laere, Fine Words & Building an American Empire: The Era of Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The a discussion of race as a social formation, see Promises: A History of Indian Policy and Its Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Impact on the Coast Reservation Tribes of NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 133–40. York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 330, 510, Nell Irvin Painter and David Roediger are both Oregon in the Last Half of the Nineteenth 2. For more background on the Donation 524; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers & Children: interested in historicizing Whiteness, although Century (Philomath, Ore.: Serendip Historical Land Claim Act, see James M. Bergquist, “The Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the Fields has accused Roediger and other propo- Research, 2010), 12–13. Oregon Donation Act and the National Land American Indian (Transaction Publishers, 1991), nents of Whiteness studies of treating White- 16. Both Linn and Benton wanted to estab- Policy,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 58:1 (March 165–69, and J.M. Opal, Avenging the People: ness as an ahistorical concept. Karen E. Fields lish a settlement in the Pacific Northwest as a 1957): 17–35; John Suval, “‘The Nomadic Race to Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul base for trade with East Asia and the potential Which I Belong’: Squatter Democracy and the American Nation, (New York: Oxford University of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, terminus of a transcontinental railroad. Michael Claiming of Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quar- Press, 2017), 207–208. 2012); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the B. Husband, “Senator Lewis F. Linn and the terly 118:3 (Fall 2017): 306–37; and Richard H. 4. I borrowed this idea from Ira Katznelson, White Race (London: Verso, 1994); Theodore Oregon Question,” Missouri Historical Review Chused, “The Oregon Donation Act of 1850 and although he used it to discuss the uneven dis- W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 66:1 (1971): 6; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: Nineteenth Century Federal Married Women’s tribution of benefits during the New Deal and Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in The American West as Symbol and Myth, 12th Property Law,” Law and History Review 2:1 post–World War II period. Ira Katznelson, When Anglo-America, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012); Printing, 2nd ed. (1950; reissued, Cambridge: (Spring 1984): 44–78. Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold His- Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial For- Harvard University Press, 1970), 31–32. 3. On Jackson and Jacksonian Demo- tory of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century mation in the United States: From the 1960s to 17. “The Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., crats’ attitudes regarding Indian removal, America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), x–xv. the 1990s 2nd ed. (New York: Psychology Press, 1st Session,” December 18, 1839, 60. settler colonialism, and White supremacy, see 5. Commissioner to Col- 1994); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White 18. Husband, “Senator Lewis F. Linn and Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: lect the Laws and Archives of Oregon and La People (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, the Oregon Question,” 13–14, 16.

432 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 433 19. For a discussion of how racist folk servation and Authentic Information (Portland: men to explain this position: “Burnett in his would convince Congress to void McLoughlin’s beliefs received scientific backing in the Harris & Holman, 1870), 357, 359. law…represented the just fears of girlhood and claim. Dorothy Nafus Morrison, Outpost: John nineteenth century, see the work of Reginald 28. Historian Gray H. Whaley points out womanhood of slaves fleeing for life and lib- McLoughlin & the Far Northwest (Portland: Horsman. Lewis Fields Linn, Speech of Mr. that settlers used indigenous markers (villages erty.” John Minto, “Antecedents of the Oregon Oregon Historical Society Press, 1999), 455–58. Linn, of Missouri, in Reply to Mr. McDuffie, on and resource sites) to mark their unsurveyed Pioneers and the Light These Throw on Their 44. James R. Perry, Richard H. Chused, the Oregon Bill: Delivered in the Senate of the claim and exhibited a disregard for any notion Motives,” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical and Mary DeLano, eds., “The Spousal Letters United States, January 26, 1843. (Washington, of “Indian Country.” Gray H. Whaley, Oregon Society 5:1 (March 1904): 45. of Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon’s First Territo- D.C., 1843), 8; Reginald Horsman, Race and and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and 36. McLagan and Project, A Peculiar rial Delegate to Congress: 1849–1851,” Oregon Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American the Transformation of an Indigenous World, Paradise, 29. Historical Quarterly 96:1 (Spring 1995): 49. Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard 1792–1859 (University of North Carolina Press, 37. Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men,” 166–67; 45. Samuel R. Thurston, “Letter of the Dele- University Press, 1981). 2010), 161–62. Stacey L. Smith, “Remaking Slavery in a Free gate from Oregon to the Members of the House 20. Linn, Speech of Mr. Linn, of Missouri, in 29. Suval, “The Nomadic Race to Which State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush Cali- of Representative in Behalf of his Constituents, Reply to Mr. McDuffie, on the Oregon Bill, 15. I Belong,” 319. fornia,” Pacific Historical Review 80:1 (February Touching the Oregon Land Bill, First Session, 21. In [the] Senate of the United States, 30. Ilia Murtazashvili, The Political Econ- 1, 2011): 53, 63. . 31st Congress,” Thurston family papers, MSS June 6, 1838, Submitted and Ordered to Be omy of the American Frontier (Cambridge: 38. See the work of Eric Foner for a discus- 379, box 1, folder 11, Oregon Historical Society Printed, Mr. Linn Submitted the Following Re- Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2. sion of how the free labor ideology informed Research Library, Portland, Oregon [hereafter port: (To Accompany Senate Bill No. 206); the 31. Burnett, Recollections and Opinions of the Free Soil Party and later the Republican OHS Research Library]. Select Committee, to Which Was Referred a Bill an Old Pioneer, 213–14. Party. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free 46. , “Geographical Statis- to Authorize the President of the United States 32. See the work of Eugene H. Berwanger Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party tics: Oregon, Its Climate, Soil, Productions, etc.,” to Occupy the Oregon Territory, Submit to the for an extended discussion of how the antislav- Before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Stryker’s American Register and Magazine, Consideration of the Senate the Following Re- ery ideology and Black exclusion often merged Press, 1995). July 1850, 220. port (Washington, D.C.: Blair & Rives, 1838), 10. in the Old Northwest. Eugene H. Berwanger, 39. Democrats dominated most elected 47. “Memorial of the Legislature of Oregon, 22. “Congressional Globe, 26th Congress, The Frontier against Slavery: Western Anti- offices in antebellum Oregon. In 1857, Oregon Praying for the Extinguishment of the Indian 1st Session,” December 18, 1839, 60. Linn later Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension voters resoundingly rejected legalizing slav- Title and the Removal of Indians from Certain expressed similar reasons for supporting the Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois ery in the state constitution. Historian David Portions of the Territory,” July 10, 1849, 2, Ameri- 1842 Armed Occupation Act in Florida, which Press, 2002), 30–59. A. Johnson cites Oregonians “idiosyncratic” can Indian and Alaskan Native Documents in granted settlers 160 acres land in exchange 33. As part of an 1788 law, Massachusetts support of Jacksonian agrarianism. For a the Congressional Serial Set: 1817-1899. for acting as paramilitary force to subdue the forbade any “African or Negroe [sic], other discussion of Jacksonian anti-slavery politics, 48. As a territorial delegate, Samuel R. Seminole Indians. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers than a subject of the Emperor of Morocco, or a see the work of Jonathan H. Earle. David Alan Thurston was forbidden from presenting bills and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Sub- citizen of some one of the United States” from Johnson, Founding the Far West: California, directly to Congress himself. Samuel R. Thur- jugation of the American Indian (New York: remaining in the commonwealth for more than Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890 (Berkeley: ston and George H. Himes, Diary of Samuel Routledge, 2017), 129. two months. If the accused refused to leave the University of California Press, 1992), 8–9; Royal Thurston, Quarterly of the Oregon His- 23. Quintard Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men: commonwealth, “he or she shall be whipped Jonathan Halperin Earle, Jacksonian Antislav- torical Society 15:3 (September 1914): 172, 175. Blacks in the Oregon Country, 1840–1860,” not exceeding ten stripes, and ordered to ery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 49. “Journal of the House of Representa- Oregon Historical Quarterly 83:2 (Summer depart out of this Commonwealth within ten (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina tive of the United States, Volume 45,” June 10, 1982): 153–54. days.” Acts and Laws of the Commonwealth of Press, 2004). 1850, 993. 24. Peter H. Burnett, Recollections and Massachusetts (Massachusetts: Wright & Potter 40. Oregon Pioneer Association, Transac- 50. For a discussion of the impact of the Opinions of an Old Pioneer (New York: D. Printing Company, 1893), 626. tions of the Twenty-Second Annual Reunion of DCLA on treaty negotiations, see Van Laere, Appleton and Co., 1880), 97. 34. Iowa Journal of History and Politics, the Oregon Pioneer Association (Portland: Geo. Fine Words & Promises, 27–35. See also Whal- 25. Maude Applegate Rucker, The Oregon “Emigration from Iowa to Oregon in 1843,” H. Himes and Company, 1894), 55. ey, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, 182–84. Trail and Some of Its Blazers (New York: W. Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 15:4 41. Suval, “‘The Nomadic Race to Which I 51. Miller, Native America, 51–53. Neale, 1930), 226. (December 1914): 292. Belong’,” 322–23. 52. “The Donation Land Claim Act (1850),” 26. Historian Robert J. Loewenberg esti- 35. Elizabeth McLagan and Oregon Black 42. “Statutes at Large, 30th Congress, 1st https://pages.uoregon.edu/mjdennis/courses/ mated that fewer than 100 men were involved History Project, A Peculiar Paradise: A History Session, Chapter 177,” August 14, 1848, 323. hst469_donation.htm (accessed April 20, 2019). in the formation of Oregon’s provisional of Blacks in Oregon, 1778–1940 (Portland: The 43. Provisional Governor Abernethy, who 53. Chused, “The Oregon Donation Act government. Robert J. Loewenberg, “Creat- Georgian Press Company, 1980), 29. John had feuded with former HBC Chief Factor of 1850,” 61. ing a Provisional Government in Oregon: A Minto, who traveled with Burnett to Oregon, John McLoughlin over competing claims to 54. In his biography of Peter H. Burnett, a Revision,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 68:1 later insisted that Burnett’s law was to prevent an island near Oregon City, handpicked the member of the provisional government’s leg- (January 1977): 15. fugitive slaves from seeking refuge in a free young lawyer as a candidate to represent islative committee, R. Gregory Nokes suggests 27. William Henry Gray, A History of territory. Minto invoked racial stereotypes about American property interests. In exchange for that Burnett may have had some influence on Oregon, 1792–1849: Drawn from Personal Ob- the sexual rapaciousness of enslaved Black his endorsement, Abernethy hoped Thurston granting land to men with White fathers and

434 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 435 indigenous mothers. R. Gregory Nokes, The in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: 75. The term “American half breed” was 89. Van Laere, Fine Words & Promises, 32. Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer University of Hawaii Press, 2006). understood to refer to men with White fathers 90. Jetté, At the Hearth of the Crossed and First Governor of California (Corvallis: Or- 63.“The Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., and Indigenous mothers. Ibid., 1093. Races, 195–96; Whaley, Oregon and the egon State University Press, 2018), 64. 1st Session,” May 28, 1850, 1079.. 76. The final version of the act limited Collapse of Illahee, 184–85; Miller, Native 55. “S. 202, Bills and Resolutions, Senate, 64. Ibid. homesteads to those who arrived by 1853 America, 158.. 31st Congress, 1st Congress, 1st Session,” April 65. Statutes of a General Nature Passed rather than 1855, but this alteration had little 91. These included treaties with the Rogue 18, 1850, 202–10. by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of impact on pre-1850 Oregon settlers. This was River Indians, the Cow Creek band of Umpquas, 56. Suval, “‘The Nomadic Race to Which Oregon: At the Second Session, Begun and later extended to 1855 in an amendment. the Molola, and various Kalapuyan bands. Van I Belong’,” 327. Held at Oregon City, December 2, 1850, 181. 77. See the work of John Suval for a Laere, Fine Words & Promises, 166–67. 57. Bergquist, “The Oregon Donation Act 66. George Klos, “Blacks and the Seminole discussion of how Whig opinion evolved 92. See the work of M. Susan Van Laere and the National Land Policy,” 31. Removal Debate, 1821–1835,” Florida Historical on the subject of free lands to cultivators. for a discussion of the disastrous impact of 58. Richard H. Chused, “The Oregon Quarterly 68:1 (July 1989): 55–78; John Missall Suval, “‘The Nomadic Race to Which I Be- unratified treaties on the tribes of the southern Donation Act of 1850 and Nineteenth Century and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: long’,” 310–11. and coastal Oregon. Van Laere, Fine Words & Federal Married Women’s Property Law,” Law America’s Longest Indian Conflict(Gainesville: 78. Bergquist, “The Oregon Donation Act Promises. and History Review 2:1 (Spring 1984): 45. University Press of Florida, 2004). and the National Land Policy,” 28–29. 93. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 249. 59. Historian Margaret D. Jacobs has 67. A least one contemporary account of 79. The absence of racial qualifications for 94. Ibid. written about the crucial role of White women the Whitman Incident blamed a “half-breed” the 1862 Homestead Act is probably due to the 95. Berwanger, The Frontier Against in settler colonial projects: “Further, through former Hudson Bay Company employee influence of Radical Republican lawmakers like Slavery, 83–84. their bodies White women would literally named Joe Lewis for inciting the attack. In Galusha Grow and Edward Wade. Foner, Free 96. Ibid., 84–85. reproduce the settler population necessary a 1915 newspaper column, historian and Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 288, 296. 97. According to T.W. Davenport, who to establishing dominance over the invaded journalist Fred Lockley presented the testi- 80. The United States did not grant citi- investigated the fate of Marion County DLCA territory.” In her work on the settler coloniza- mony of massacre survivor, Elizabeth Sager zenship to indigenous people until the 1924 claims in 1903, 66 percent of claims had tion of British Columbia, historian Adele Perry Helm. In the piece, Helm referred to Lewis Indian Citizenship Act. The 1790 Naturalization fallen out of possession, while another 15 described a settler colony as “a reproduc- as a “Catholic halfbreed negro and Indian Act restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a percent were mortgaged. T.W. Davenport, tive regime dependent on the presence of who incited the massacre.” Other sources, free white person” who had lived in the United “An Object Lesson in Paternalism,” Quarterly settler women who literally reproduce the however, refer to Lewis as Métis or of partial States for over two years. of the Oregon Historical Society 4:1 (March colony. Immigration must therefore provide Delaware Native ancestry. Fred Lockley, 81. James P. McClure et al., “Circumvent- 1903): 50–51. more than non-Aboriginal bodies. Ideally, it “The Oregon Country, In Early Days,” Oregon ing the Dred Scott Decision: Edward Bates, 98. David Peterson del Mar, “14th Amend- must provide the right kind of bodies, those Daily Journal, March 17, 1915, p. 6; Cameron Salmon P. Chase, and the Citizenship of African ment,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, https:// suited to building a white settler colony.” Addis, “The : Religion and Americans,” Civil War History 43, no. 4 (1997): oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/14th_amend- Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Manifest Destiny on the , 279–309, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.1997.0067. ment/ (accessed September 24, 2019). Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and 1809–1858,” Journal of the Early Republic 82. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: Amer- 99. The Fourteenth Amendment to the the Removal of Indigenous Children in the 25:2 (Summer 2005): 243; Julie Roy Jeffrey, ica’s Unfinished Revolution,1863 –1877 (New Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution granted American West and Australia, 1880–1940 Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa York: Harper Collins, 2011). birthright citizenship and equal protection (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), Whitman (Norman and London: University of 83. Bergquist, “The Oregon Donation Act under the law; the Fifteenth Amendment 129; Adele Perry, “Hardy Backwoodsmen, Oklahoma Press, 1991). and the National Land Policy,” 30. granted voting rights to adult males of Wholesome Women, and Steady Families: 68. Kenneth R. Coleman, Dangerous Sub- 84. Paul Bourke and Donald A. DeBats, any “race, color, or previous condition of Immigration and the Construction of a jects: James D. Saules and the Rise of Black Washington County: Politics and Community in servitude.” See also special section “Public White Society in Colonial British Columbia, Exclusion in Oregon, (Corvallis: Oregon State Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins History Roundtable,” Oregon Historical Quar- 1849–1871,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, University Press, 2017), 140. University Press, 1998), 65. terly 119:3 (Fall 2018): 354–99, including: Car- 33:66 (November 2000): 345. 69. “The Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 85. Ibid., 78, 89. men P. Thompson, “Housing Segregation and 60. Melinda Marie Jetté, At the Hearth of 1st Session,” 1080. 86. Abigail J. Duniway, Captain Gray’s Resistance: An Introduction”; Greta Smith, “ the Crossed Races: A French-Indian Commu- 70. Ibid., for quote. William Sackett also Company, Or, Crossing the Plains and Living ‘Congenial Neighbors’: Restrictive Covenants nity in Nineteenth-Century Oregon, 1812–1859 seemed to counter the established U.S. Natu- in Oregon. (S.J. McCormick, 1859), 173. and Residential Segregation in Portland, (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, ralization Law of 1802, which restricted citizen- 87. Bourke and De Bats, Washington Oregon”; Melissa Cornelius Lang, “ ‘A place 2015), 199. ship to “free white” males. County, 81. under the sun’: African American Resistance 61. “The Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 71. Ibid, 1090. 88. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian to Housing Exclusion”; and Leanne Serbulo, 1st Session,” May 28, 1850, 1079. 72. Ibid. Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly “Small steps on the Long Journey to Equality: 62. Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Wat- 73. Ibid, 1092. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, A Timeline of Post-Legislation Civil Rights son, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians 74. Ibid, 1092–93. 1997), 246–47. Struggles in Portland.”

436 OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 Coleman, “We’ll All Start at Even” 437