exhibition of petty tyranny on the part of those who were present, and of culpable neglect on the part of those who remained absent. From the date of Judge Bryant's arrival in the territory in April 1849, to the 1st of January 1851, when he resigned, he had spent but five months in his district. From December 1848 to August 1850 Pratt had been the only judge in Oregon—excepting Bryant's brief sojourn. Then he went east for his family, and Strong was the only judge for the eight months following, and till the return about the last of April 1851 of Pratt, accompanied by Chief Justice Thomas Nelson, appointed in the place of Bryant,[1] and J. R. Preston, surveyor-general of Oregon.
The judges found their several dockets in a condition hardly to justify Thurston's encomiums in congress upon their excellence of character. The freedom enjoyed under the provisional government, due in part to the absence of temptation, when all men were laborers, and when the necessity for mutual help and protection deprived them of a motive for violence, had ceased to be the boast and the security of the country. The presence of lawless adventurers, the abundance of money, and the absence of courts, had tended to develop the criminal element, till in 1851 it became notorious that the causes on trial were oftener of a criminal than a civil nature.[2]
- ↑ Memorial of the Legislative Assembly of 1851–2, in 32d Cong., 1st Sess., H. Misc. Doc., ix. 2–3. Thomas Nelson was born at Peekskill, New York, January 23, 1819. He was the third son of William Nelson, a representative in congress, a lawyer by profession, and a man of worth and public spirit. Thomas graduated at Williams college at the age of 17. Being still very young he was placed under a private tutor of ability in New York city, that he might study literature and the French language. He also attended medical lectures, acquiring in various ways thorough culture and scholarship, after which he added European travel to his other sources of knowledge, finally adopting law as a profession. Advancing in the practice of the law, he became an attorney and counsellor of the supreme court of the United States, and was practising with his father in Westchester county, New York, when he was appointed chief justice of Oregon. Judge Nelson's private character was faultless, his manners courteous, and his bearing modest and refined. Livingston's Biog. Sketches, 69–72; S. R. Thurston, in Or. Spectator, April 10, 1851.
- ↑ Strong's Hist. Or., MS., 14. On the 7th of January 1851 William Hamilton was shot and killed near Salem by William Kendall on whose land claim
