companies being fully organized, the regiment was ordered to Vancouver about the last of May 1862, where it was clothed with United States uniforms, and armed with old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifles, pistols, and sabres; after which it proceeded to The Dalles.
On the 3d of June, Colonel Cornelius arrived at Fort Walla Walla with companies B and E, and took command of that post. About two weeks later the three southern companies followed, making a force of 600. The necessity for some military force at home was not altogether unfelt. The early reverses of the federal army gave encouragement to secession on the Pacific coast. General Wright, on the 30th of April, 1862, issued an order confiscating the property of rebels within the limits of his department, and making sales or transfers of land by such persons illegal.[1] Government officers refused to purchase forage or provisions from disloyal firms; and disloyal newspapers were excluded from the mails.[2]
- ↑ A circular was issued from the land office at Washington confining grants of land to persons 'loyal to the United States, and to such only;' and requiring all surveyors and preëmptors to take the oath of allegiance. Or. Argus, March 8, 1862; Or. Statesman, March 3, 1862.
- ↑ The Albany Democrat was excluded from the mails; also the Southern Oregon Gazette, the Eugene Democratic Register, and next the Albany Inquirer, followed by the Portland Advertiser, published by S. J. McCormick, and the Corvallis Union, conducted by Patrick J. Malone. W. G. T'Vault started a secession journal at Jacksonville in November 1862, called the Oregon Intelligencer. The Albany Democrat resumed publication by permission, under the charge of James O'Meara in the early part of February 1863. In May O'Meara revived the Eugene Register, under the name of Democratic Review. The Democratic State Journal at The Dalles was sold in 1863 to W. W. Bancroft, and changed to a union paper, in Idaho. Union journals were started about this time; among them The State Republican, at Eugene City, was first published by Shaw & Davis on the materials of the People's Press, in January 1862, edited by J. M. Gale, and the Union Crusader at the same place, by A. C. Edmonds, in October, changed in a month to The Herald of Reform. The first daily published in Oregon was the Portland News, April 18, 1859; S. A. English & Co. The Portland Daily Times was first issued Dec. 19, 1860, and the Portland Daily Oregonian, Feb. 4, 1861. The first newspaper east of The Dalles was the Mountain Sentinel, a weekly journal started at La Grande in October 1864, by E. S. McComas. In the spring of 1865 the Tri-Weekly Advertiser was started at Umatilla on the materials of the Portland Times, and the following year a democratic journal, the Columbia
or parts of companies. Brown's Autobiography, MS., 47; Letter of Lieut Waymire, in Historical Correspondence, MS.; Rhinehart's Oregon Cavalry, MS., 1–2.
