OREGON PIONEER WA-WA A COMPILATION OF ADDRESSES OF CHARLES B. MOORES RELATING TO OREGON PIONEER HISTORY PREFACE The within compilation of addresses represents an accumulation of years. Being reluctant to destroy them we are moved for our own personalsatisfaction, to preserve theni in printed form.They contain much that is commonplace, and much that is purely personal and local in character.There is a great surplus of rhetoric. There is possibly an excess of eulogy. There is considerable repetition.There are probably inaccuracies. Thereisnothing, however, included in the compilation that does not have some bearing on Oregon Pioneer History, and this, at least, gives it sonic value.As but a limited nuniber of copies are to be printed, and these arc solely for gratuitous distribution among a few friends, and others, having some interest in the subjects treated, we send the volume adrift, just as it is, without apology and without elimination. Portland, Oregon, March 10, 1923. CHAS. B. MOOnJiS. ADDRESSES Page Chenieketa Lodge No. 1, I. 0. 0. F I Completion of Building of the First M. E. Church of Salem, Oregon 12 Printers' Picnic, Salem, Oregon, 1881 19 Dedication of the Odd Fellows' Temple in Salem, Ore.,190L26 Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration Chemeketa Lodge,I. 0. 0. F. No. 1, Salem, Oregon 34 I)onatjon Land LawFiftieth Anniversary Portland Daily Oregonian 44 Annual Reunion Pioneer Association, Yambill County, Oregon50 Unveiling Marble Tablet, Rev. Alvin F. Wailer 62 Thirty-second Annual Reunion, Oregon State Pioneer Asso- ciation, 1904 69 Laying Cornerstone Eaton Hall, Willarnette University,De- cember 16, 1908 87 Champoeg, May 1911 94 Dedication Jason Lee Memorial Church, Salem, June, 1912 100 Memorial Address, Champocg, Oregon, May 2nd, 1914 107 Oregon M. E. Conference, at First M. E.Church, 1918 112 Celebration Seventy-fifth Anniversary FoundingCongrega- tional Church, Oregon City, Oregon 131 ADDRESS AT SALEM, OREGON On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Celebration OF CHEMEKETA LODGE NO.1,1.0.0. F. Annals are usually confined to the narration of facts and events in their chronological order to the exclusion of any original observations upon the part of the writer such as are allowed in what is called history. What is herewith presented to you has been dignified with the rather vague title of "Historical Review", by which is perhaps meant a sort of nondescript, milk-and-water compound of the two.It will consist in this case of but the plain recital of a few homely and commonplace facts and is presented as a minor historical picture in the great composite picture of many suggestive groups which are to go toward making up the annals of this northwestern coast.History is gossip; not exactly that of the sewing-circle but of a higher order and of more permanent value.If men hadn't gossipped in all ages and told to friends and neighbors and countrymen around the fireside and the camp-fire and from the rostrum what they had seen and heard, much of our present history would have been buried in oblivion, many of the brightest names would be unknown and many of the most important chapters would be veiled in obscurity. To talk and to tell what he knows is one of the most important functions of man, and it is the business of the historian to learn what men have done and talked about, and his sacred duty to tell it with accuracy and impartiality.He is a gossip monger. His mission is to perpetuate facts, to condense, to crystalize and to transmit; to pare off the edges of incident and accident and to dovetail fragments in one historical mosaic. He's a middle-man; a go-between; at once separating and connecting two areas. He doesn't originate, he simply collects and moulds and disseminates. With us twenty-five years nearly comprises our whole history and dates back almost to the foundation of our social and political fabric. This sketch is to be a brief record of the first twenty-five years of Chemeketa Lodge No. 1, I. 0. 0. F.The writer is to be charged for all deficiencies in plot and execution. Where it is deficient in detail of facts the responsibility must be divided be- tween P. G. M., E. M. Barnum, from whose history of Oregon Odd Fellowship we have largely drawn, P. G., J. Henry Brown, to whom we are indebted for a synopsis of Chemeketa's first twenty years, the fading recollections of some of the old membersand the dry and forbidding record books of the Lodge. The two first named sources we deem reliable.As for tholder members they think and believe many things, but know much less of the early history of the Lodge than would be acceptable, while the minute books are but a desert waste of motions and resolves with only here and there a refreshing oasis of incident.In details, of more than passing and momentary interest they are poverty-stricken, and it would seem that nothing of permanent value was ever allowed 2 to go upon record. There are indications now and then of some- thing beneath the surface, occasional ebullitions of wit and wrath, of eloquent appeal and charitable resolve, and here and there a curious commingling of the humorous, the practical and the sentimental, but in all these are only hints and inferences.The average secretary veils all important facts in obscure diction and dodges clear expression with the most provoking persistency. THE EARLIEST RECORDED EFFORTS To establish Odd Fellowship in Oregon occurred in 1846. There were, in that year, applications looking toward this end from Washington, from St. Louis and from Massachusetts, all having Oregon as the focal point.P. G. M., S. Y. Atlee, of Wash- ington, D. C., was one who made application for this purpose to Thomas Sherlock who was then Grand Sire.Some brothers in St. Louis also applied for power to institute a lodge in that city and remove the same to some point in Oregon.Neither of these applications were granted.Early in the same year application was received from Gilbert Watson, P. G., of Massachusetts, for dispensation to establish a lodge in Oregon City on his arrival there. He represented that five Odd Fellows were in a party that was about to start for Oregon, and upon his representations he received a dispensation from the D. D. G. Sire, of Massachusetts, though this act was without warrant of law.The G. L. U. S., attempted, however, to legalize the act by afterward forwarding to Bro. Watson a new charter in the place of the one first given, and that year covered into its treasury $30, to the credit of "Oregon City Lodge No. 1," an imaginary waif in Odd Fellowship that hasn't had an existence even to this day.Bro. Watson's party, for whom this dispensation was issued, sailed from Massachusetts in April, 1846, but never reached its destination.After a journey of thousands of miles down the Atlantic coast, passing around. Cape Horn and up into the bosom of the Pacific, drifting with the winds and the waves, this little party finally found anchorage in Honolulu, of the Sandwich Islands, thousands of miles from the place of their destination.Their defective charter which was for a lodge in Oregon City and which was legalized by subsequent vote of the G. L. U. S. was the official nucleus around which was gathered the first lodge of Odd Fellows west of the Rocky Moun- tains. Not in this Northwest State, but, by a singular chance, at Honolulu, away out in the waters of the Pacific, and there today in the hail of "Excelsior Lodge No. 1," is doubtless hanging that old charter which, but for ifs and circumstances, would be hang- ing today in the hall of "Oregon Lodge No. 3."Honolulu now claims it both by right of prescription and by formal vote of the G. L U. S.If it hadn't been for stormy seas and the peculiar combination of circumstances which attended the long voyage of Bro. Watson's party, we would not have been here tonight and Odd Fellowship in Oregon would have been many days older. The Grand Lodge of the United States learning of this failure to transplant the Order into this territory, made several other efforts looking toward the same end, and their plans finally took form in the appointment of P. G., Alex. V. Frazer, of the District of Columbia, as a "special commissioner" to establish and supervise the Order in California and Oregon and in the islands of the 3 Pacific during the pleasure of the Grand Lodge.Bro. Frazer was sent out by the Government in that year to supervise the Revenue service on the Pacific coast. He was commissioned for his work as an Odd Fellow, as a Special Deputy Grand Sire of the Order, September 23, 1848.The discovery of gold in California so modified his duties as a Government Revenue officer that he never came to Oregonanother circumstance which had its weight in bringing us together tonight. By a somewhat singular coinci- dence Bro. Frazer did, however, visit Honolulu, and bearing a regularly-issued charter from the G. L. U. S., intended for "Oregon Lodge No. 1", he made use of it in placing "Excelsior Lodge No. 1", at that place upon a proper footing. From this time until 1850 nothing seems to have been done toward introducing the Order in Oregon.In the latter years there was a feeble effort made but it resulted in nothing.In 1851 the Odd Fellows of Salem and Portland began to canvass the matter of organizing subordinate lodges.In December of this year while the Territorial Legis- lature was holding its first session in the old University building and the Supreme Court was meeting in that imposing structure known as the Bennett house, notices were distributed by Bro.