The Provisional Government: Oregon Governs Itself Before the Nation Gets Around to It

For five years, Oregon was a country that no country had gotten around to claiming yet.

By the early eighteen forties, the Willamette Valley had several hundred American settlers who had arrived via the Oregon Trail or had drifted south from the Hudson's Bay Company's operations at Fort Vancouver. The Oregon Country was technically under joint American and British occupation by treaty arrangement, which meant, in practice, that neither government had authority over the settlers and neither government was in any rush to provide it. The British had the Hudson's Bay Company and were satisfied. The Americans had a fur trader named Ewing Young who died in eighteen forty-one leaving a substantial estate and no territorial government capable of settling it.

A series of meetings at Champoeg, in the Willamette Valley, produced, by a slim majority, a vote in May of eighteen forty-three to form a provisional government. The margin, in the most-cited version of events, was fifty-two votes to fifty in favor, with a handful of French-Canadian settlers joining the American side to produce the majority. The actual vote count is disputed by historians, with accounts ranging from fifty-two to fifty-five for the winning side, but the outcome is not: the settlers voted themselves a government.

The provisional government of Oregon was entirely self-created, operating in disputed international territory, with no sanction from any nation and no formal recognition from the United States until Congress passed the Oregon Territory Act in eighteen forty-eight. The government wrote laws, settled land claims, handled criminal matters, and functioned as a working civil authority for five years on nothing but the consent of those it governed.

The boundary question between the United States and Britain was settled by the Oregon Treaty of eighteen forty-six, which fixed the border at the forty-ninth parallel and gave the United States sole jurisdiction over what is now Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The Americans who had been running the provisional government had been right about which way history was moving. They simply had to wait for their own nation to catch up.

When Congress finally created the Oregon Territory in eighteen forty-eight, it was partly in response to the Cayuse War that had begun the previous year, following the killing of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman at their mission near what is now Walla Walla. The violence brought congressional attention to a region the government had been happy to ignore. Oregon got a territorial government partly because the frontier had become complicated enough to require one.

Statehood followed in eighteen fifty-nine. The provisional government is a footnote in most histories of the United States. In Oregon, it is a founding story: the moment the settlers decided not to wait.