Pioneer Pot Pourri
By CHARLES B. MOORES
We appear on this occasion, not as a self-starter, but as a conscript, in an attempt to fill space that was declined by another. We are not commissioned to discuss, or limited to, any topic. To avoid being hampered by the discussion of any particular subject Artemus Ward occasionally adopted as the heading of his favorite discourses “The Babes of the Wood.”
Our subject this evening will be “Pioneer Pot Pourri,” which is elastic, as well as comprehensive.
As pioneers of Oregon we are today facing conditions entirely different from those of the real pioneer era. Most of us are only nominally pioneers. Few of us ever had to subsist on a diet of boiled wheat, or wear moccasins and buckskin suits, but many of us remember the days when for water we went to the well sweep and the pump instead of the faucet, when we sprinkled our lawns with a tin sprinkler instead of a hose, when we heated our water in a wash boiler and bathed in the family wash tub, when we played seven-up and casino instead of bridge whist, and danced the old-time quadrilles and the Virginia reel instead of the fox trot, the Charleston and the bunny hug. We were making history then without knowing it, and were not interested in historical controversies of any kind. We woke up about 30 or 40 years ago. Since then we have been writing considerable history and manufacturing considerable of it on the side. Various historical controversies have arisen, and our dreams, and the meditations of our waking hours have been disturbed by outbreaks that should have been settled in the quiescent days of long ago. These controversies have usually been bloodless but a number of them have been acrimonious and extremely irritating. They still exist and postponement of their final settlement results in continuous complications . Although we are now in the recent 1920s, a president has revamped and given his quasi-approval of the fable that Dr. Whitman saved Oregon. The school children of the state have been invited to turn in their pennies for the erection of a memorial to Judge J. Q. Thornton for giving them the 36th section, and the story that Col. Jos. L. Meek turned the tide and settled the question of American sovereignty at Champoeg by calling for "a divide" is still being continuously propagated. To cap the climax, an Oregon historian, backed by a “School Masters' Club,” has told the world that a recent typical Oregon Legislature was an aggregation of "briefless lawyers, farmless farmers, business failures, bar-room loafers, and political thugs, the larger part of whom were ignorant, illiterate, lazy politically, and personally immoral, among whom drunkenness and debauchery commonly prevailed.”
The authority for all this is a salaried muckraker writing
at a time when muckraking was one of the leading industries
of the country. The sins of an average legislature are flagrant enough without being treated with an elaborate embellishment of this kind. Napoleon has told us that "history is fable agreed upon." Henry Ford says "all history is bunk,” which is simply his way of saying that he agrees with Napoleon. Considering much that has been promulgated as history one might be excused for accepting the dictum of both Ford and Napoleon. The elimination of what is bunk in history is one of the sacred duties of the historian. To establish the verities of history should be his constant aim. We have been repeatedly told that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. 'То which might be added it is also the price of historical accuracy. It is a dangerous and unwelcome task to question any popular fable, so deeply does it take root, and so fond is the average man of the unusual, or of anything that runs along the border line of the spectacular. History, properly, is founded solely on facts. It is said that Cromwell once rejected a portrait of himself because the artist had eliminated a large wart which was one of his conspicuous facial adornments. We have been told that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It was a good job, whoever did it. But whoever did should have the credit.