Besides church-going, attending singing-school,[1] and visiting among the neighbors there were few assemblages. There was occasionally a ball, which was not regarded by the leading Protestant citizens as the most unquestionable mode of cultivating social relations. The Canadian families loved dancing, and balls were not the more respectable for that reason;[2] but the dancers cared little for the absence of the élite. Taking them all in all, says Burnett, "I never saw so fine a population;" and other writers claimed that though lacking in polish the Oregon people were at this period morally and socially the equal of those of any frontier state.[3] From the peculiar conditions of an isolated colony like that of Oregon, early marriages became the rule. Young men required homes, and young women were probably glad to escape from the overfilled hive of the parental roof to a domicile of their own. However that may have been, girls were married at any age from fourteen upward, and in some instances earlier;[4] while no widow, whether
- ↑ James Morris, in Camp Fire Orations, MS., 20, says that the first singing-school in the country was taught by a Mr Johnson, and that he went to it dressed in a suit of buckskin dyed black, which looked well, and did not stretch out over the knees like the uncolored skin.
- ↑ Moss' Pioneer Times, MS., 32. In Minto's Early Days, MS., and Mrs Minto's Female Pioneering, MS., there are many pictures of the social condition of the colony. The same in Camp Fire Orations, MS., a report by my stenographer, of short speeches made at an evening session of the pioneers at their annual meeting in 1878. All the speakers except Mrs Minto declared they had enjoyed emigrating and pioneering. She thought both very hard on females; though throughout all she conducted herself as one of the noblest among women.
- ↑ Home Missionary, xx. 213–14.
- ↑ As a guide to descent in the pioneer families I here affix a list of the marriages published in the Spectator from the beginning of 1846 to the close of 1848. Though these could not have been all, it may be presumed that people of social standing would desire to publish this momentous event: 1846—Feb. 25, Samuel Campbell to Miss Chellessa Chrisman; March 29, Henry Sewell to Miss Mary Ann Jones Gerish; April 2, Stephen Staats to Miss Cordelia Forrest; April 12, Silas Haight to Mrs Rebecca Ann Spalding; May 4, Pierre Bonnin to Miss Louise Rondeau; May 10, Isaac Staats to Miss Orlena Maria Williams; May 10, Henry Marlin to Miss Emily Hipes; June 4, David Hill to Mrs Lucinda Wilson; June 14, J. W. Nesmith to Miss Caroline Goff; June 17, Alanson Hinman to Miss Martha Elizabeth Jones Gerish; June 28, Robert Newell to Miss Rebecca Newman; July 2, Mitchel Whitlock to Miss Malvina Engle; July 4, William C. Dement to Miss Olivia Johnson; J. B. Jackson to Miss Sarah Parker; July 25, John G. Campbell to Miss Rothilda E. Buck; July 26, Joseph Watt to Miss Sarah Craft; Aug.
