In order to sustain his position with regard to the location act, Games appealed for an opinion to the attorney-general of the United States, who returned for an answer that the legislature had a right to locate the seat of government without the consent of the governor, but that the governor's concurrence was necessary to make legal the expenditure of the appropriations,[1] which reply left untouched the point raised by Gaines, that the act was invalid because it embraced more than one object. With regard to this matter the attorney-general was silent, and the quarrel stood as at the beginning, the governor refusing to recognize the law of the legislature as binding on him. His enemies ceased to deny the unconstitutionally of the law, admitting that it might prove void by reason of non-conformity to the organic act, but they contended that until this was shown to be true in a competent court, it was the law of the land; and to treat it as a nullity before it had been disapproved by congress, to which all the acts of the legislature must be submitted, was to establish a dangerous precedent, a principle striking at the foundation of all law and the public security.
Into this controversy the United States judges were necessarily drawn, the organic act requiring them to hold a term of court, annually, at the seat of government; any two of the three constituting a
- ↑ Or. Spectator, July 29, 1851; Or. Statesman, Aug. 5, 1851.
in dress as well. Whenever one wished to appear well before his or her friends, they resurrected from old chests and trunks clothes made years ago. Now, as one costumer in one part of the world at one time, had made one dress, and another had made at another time another dress, an assembly in Oregon at this time presented to a new-comer, accustomed to only one fashion at once, a peculiar sight. Mrs Walker, wife of a missionary at Chimikane, near Fort Colville, having been 11 years from her clothed sisters, on coming to Oregon City was surprised to find her dresses as much in the fashion as any of the rest of them.' Mrs Wilson, Or. Sketches, MS., 16, 17. Another says of the missionary and pioneer families: 'One lady who had been living at Clatsop since 1846 had a parasol well preserved, at least 30 years old, with a folding handle and an ivory ring to slip over the folds when closed. Another lady had a bonnet and shawl of nearly the same age which she wore to church. All these articles were of good quality, and an evidence of past fashion and respectability.' Manners as well as clothes go out of mode, and much of the oddity Mrs Wilson discovered in an Oregon assembly in Gov. Gaines' time was only manners out of fashion.
