majority, was that of the anti-Hudson's Bay Company sentiment, which was industriously worked up by the missionary element, in the absence of a large number of the voters of the territory, notably of the Canadians, and the young and independent western men.[1] Thurston was besides a democrat, to which party the greater part of the population belonged; but it is the testimony of those who knew best that it was not as a democrat that he was elected.[2] As a member of the legislature at its last session under the provisional government, he displayed some of those traits which made him a powerful and useful champion, or a dreaded and hated foe.
Much has been said about the rude and violent manners of western men in pursuit of an object, but Thurston was not a western man; he was supposed to be something more elevated and refined, more cool and logical, more moral and Christian than the people beyond the Alleghanies; he was born and bred an eastern man, educated at an eastern college, was a good Methodist, and yet in the canvass of
- ↑ Thurston received 470 votes; C. Lancaster, 321; Meek and Griffin, 46; J. W. Nesmith, 106. Thurston was a democrat and Nesmith a whig. Tribune Almanac, 1850, 51.
- ↑ Mrs E. F. Odell, née McClench, who came to Oregon as Thurston's wife, and who cherishes a high regard for his talents and memory, has furnished to my library a biographical sketch of her first husband. Though strongly tinctured by personal and partisan feeling, it is valuable as a view from her standpoint of the character and services of the ambitious young man who first represented Oregon in congress—how worthily, the record will determine. Mr Thurston was born in Monmouth, Maine, in 1816, and reared in the little town of Peru, subject to many toils and privations common to the Yankee youth of that day. He possessed a thirst for knowledge also common in New England, and became a hard student at the Wesleyan seminary at Readfield, from which he entered Bowdoin college, graduating in the class of 1843. He then entered on the study of law in Brunswick, where he was soon admitted to practice. A natural partisan, he became an ardent democrat, and was not only fearless but aggressive in his leadership of the politicians of the school. Having married Miss Elizabeth F. McClench, of Fayette, he removed with her to Burlington, Iowa, in 1845, where he edited the Burlington Gazette till 1847, when he emigrated to Oregon. From his education as a Methodist, his talents, and readiness to become a partisan, he naturally affiliated with the Mission party. Mrs Odell remarks in her Biography of Thurston, MS., 4, that he was 'not elected as a partisan, though his political views were well understood;' but L. F. Grover, who knew him well in college days and afterward, says that 'he ran on the issue of the missionary settlers against the Hudson's Bay Company.' Public Life in Or., MS., 95.
