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“We'll All Start Even”

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“We'll All Start Even” Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives Gary Halvorson, Oregon State “We’ll All Start Even” White Egalitarianism and the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act KENNETH R. COLEMAN THIS MURAL, located in the northwest corner of the Oregon State Capitol 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. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding to Fort Vancouver 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 Oregon Country 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 United States.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 Pacific Northwest 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 OrHi 96907 Library, OHS Research of Oregon.6 By the early 1840s, 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 Oregon Trail 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 Oregon Treaty 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, Louisiana: European
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