all that portion of the Willamette Valley south of Benton and Linn;[1] and Umpqua, comprising all the country south of the Calapooya mountains and headwaters of the Willamette. County seats were located in Linn, Polk, and Clatsop, the county seats of Clackamas and Washington having been established at the previous sessions of the legislature.[2]
The act passed by the first legislature for collecting the county and territorial revenues was amended; and a law passed legalizing the acts of the sheriff of Linn county, and the probate court of Yamhill county, in the collection of taxes, and to legalize the judicial proceedings of Polk county; these being cases where the laws of the previous sessions were found to be in conflict with the organic act. Some difficulty had been encountered in collecting taxes on land to which the occupants had as yet no tangible title. The same feeling existed after the passage of the donation law, though some legal authorities contended, and it has since been held that the donation act gave the occupant his land in fee simple, and that a patent was only evidence of his ownership.[3] But it took more time to settle these questions of law than the people or the legislature had at their command in 1850; hence conflicts arose which neither the judicial nor
- ↑ Eugene City Guard, July 8, 1876; Eugene City State Journal, July 8, 1876.
- ↑ It is difficult determining the value of these enactments, when for several sessions one after the other acts with the same titles appear—instance the county seat of Polk county, which was located in 1849 and again in 1850.
- ↑ Deady's Scrap Book, 5. For some years Matthew P. Deady employed his leisure moments as a correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin, his subjects often being historical and biographical matter, in which he was, from his habit of comparing evidence, very correct, and in which he sometimes enunciated a legal opinion. His letters, collected in the form of a scrap-book, were kindly loaned to me. From these Scraps I have drawn largely; and still more frequently from his History of Oregon, a thick manuscript volume given to me from his own lips in the form of a dictation while I was in Portland in 1878, and taken down by my stenographer. Never in the course of my life have I encountered in one mind so vast, well arranged, and well digested a store of facts, the recital of which to me was a never failing source of wonder and admiration. His legal decisions and public addresses have also been of great assistance to me, being free from the injudicial bias of many authors, and hence most substantial material for history to rest upon. Further than this, Judge Deady is a graceful writer, and always interesting. As a man, he is one to whom Oregon owes much.
