wonderful market for everything the northern region could produce. Packers visited the farms, buying up the surplus flour, meat, lard, butter, eggs, vegetables, and fruits. A large number of boats entered the Columbia, ascending to the new village of Portland on the Willamette, where they took on cargoes of provisions as rapidly as these could be collected from up the river. Cargoes of lumber were carried away from the mills already established, and these proving insufficient to meet the demand, others were built and put Into operation at various points along the Columbia. Farmers, merchants, labourers, manufacturers, speculators, in fact all classes of settlers in Oregon reaped a magnificent harvest from the filling up of California, and the new wealth of gold. Debts were cancelled, homes improved, and the conditions of life made easier and more pleasant than they had been in the strictly pioneer time; new enterprises of all sorts were started in the Willamette settlement, machinery was imported for the use of the farmer, roads opened, and steamboats placed upon the rivers. The new territorial government, which fortunately came just at the beginning of the new age, was of great benefit to the people in many ways. Among other things it enabled them to make some provision for a system of common schools,^ and
iThe pioneers of the Northwest showed commendable enterprise in the establishment of high-grade schools, the earliest of which was the Oregon Institute founded by the Methodist missionaries at Salem in 1841. It afterward grew into the Willamette University. The second was Tualatin Academy, the beginning of Pacific University. Common schools were also main
