146 F. G. YOUNG. and the partisan press indulged in explicit denunciations for graft. 41 Four different boards were successively placed in charge of the work of construction. The sixty-thousand-dollar fund was exhausted and some accounts left unsettled and the legislature was petitioned because of others unallowed. Meanwhile the Territory had been under the necessity of reimbursing the city of Portland for a jail destroyed while under lease to the penitentiary board as a place for the confinement of convicts pending the preparation of quarters at the new building, the convicts had been supported in idleness and numerous rewards paid for the return of those that had escaped. At the close of this period, however, there were only six cells completed that could afford any degree of security 42 in confining the convicts, no shops, and no grounds that could at any reasonable cost be prepared for them. The building was mislocated so that it stood in part on private property and in part in the streets of Portland. The grounds were "included in an exceedingly deep gulch or canyon." Altogether the situation was so un- promising-, after the sinking of sixty thousand dollars, that the first Governor of the State and the committee appointed to investigate the matter, were constrained to recommend the abandonment of the property as a penitentiary. 43 41 Appendix to House Journal, Sixth Session, pp. 106-129; The Oregonian, February 4, 1854. 42 Appendix to House Journal, Ninth Session, pp. 38-41. 43 Message of Governor Whiteaker, September 24, 1860, in Appendix to C. J., First Session, pp. 23-32, and Appendix to House Journal, same session, pp. 5-12. Those to whom the labor of the convicts had been leased during the later years of this period were coming to the legislature with pleas for reimbursement for rewards paid for the return of escaped convicts. They attributed their mis- fortunes to the unsuitable and inadequate sixty-thousand-dollar structure. They claimed further that there was equity in their claim of $4,000 for outlay for "rewards for the recapture of escaped convicts," in that they were supporting the convicts for the products of their labor and thus relieving the Territory from a burden of $23,000 the cost of the maintenance of the convicts in idleness under the old law allowing $5.00 a week for board. The following penitentiary statistics will help to make clearer the situation : 1853. Two convicts were reported to be in Clark County as the whole mimber that belonged in the Territorial Pentitentiary under the charge of the
