ington all the provisions of the Oregon land law, or any of its amendments, and authorized a separate corps of officers for this additional surveying district, whose duties should be the same as those of the surveyor general, register, and receiver of Oregon. It also gave two townships of land each to Oregon and Washington in lieu of the two townships granted by the original act to Oregon for university purposes.
Later, on March 12, 1860, the provisions of the act of September 28, 1850, for aiding in reclaiming the swamp lands of Arkansas, were extended to Oregon, by which the state obtained a large amount of valuable lands, of which gift I shall have something to say hereafter.
From the abstract here given of the donation law at different periods, my reader will be informed not only of the bounty of the government, but of the onerous nature of the duties of the surveyor-general, who was to adjudicate in all matters of dispute or question concerning land titles. His instructions authorized and required him to settle the business of the Oregon City claim by notifying all purchasers, donees, or assigns of lots or parts of lots acquired of McLoughlin previous to March 4, 1849, to present their evidences of title, and have their land surveyed, in order that patents might be issued to them; and this in 1852 was rapidly being done.[1]
His special attention was directed to the third article of the treaty of 1846, between the United States and Great Britain, which provided that in the future appropriation of the territory south of 49° north latitude, the possessory rights[2] of the Hudson's Bay
- ↑ U. S. H. Ex. Doc. 52, v. 25, 32d cong. 1st sess.
- ↑ This subject came up in a peculiar shape as late as 1871, when H. W. Corbett was in the U. S. senate. A case had to be decided in the courts of Oregon in 1870, where certain persons claimed under William Johnson, who before the treaty of 1846 settled upon a tract of land south of Portland. But Johnson died before the land law was passed, and the courts decided that in this case Johnson had first lost his possessory rights by abandoning the claim; by dying before the donation law was passed, he was not provided
