The Contenders

A friend of mine, the late Ken Metzler, was a Journalism professor at the University of Oregon when I was associated with that institution in the 1960s and '70s. He was a native born Oregonian and in 1986 wrote a book about his home state.  Ken tells his readers that Oregon exports more than lumber, filberts (a.k.a., hazelnuts) and oscilloscopes.  It exports mystique. He explains while Oregon will never be the financial, industrial, intellectual, or entertainment capital of the nation, it does have something most of the others do not: its beneficent nature has made it, in the words of Portland artist Byron Ferris, the first-class cabin of Spaceship Earth.
                                                                                                                                                              The question before us today is which citizen, through his/her individual efforts, made the most significant contribution to that beneficent nature? Let's review the contenders for The Most Valuable Player award in order of their appearance on the big stage.

First up: Abigail Scott Duniway.

The Scott family with, 17-year-old Abigail, left Illinois to follow the Oregon Trail in 1851. It was a terrible journey with drownings and deaths from Cholera that took her mother and younger brother. That crossing of the continent was a formative experience for the young woman and it surfaced time and again in her writing and her involvement in the battle for women's rights.

Abigail became a school teacher and a pioneer farm wife wedded to Ben Duniway.  When Ben suffered financial setbacks and then injury in an accident, Abigail assumed the support responsibility for their family that included six children.  She built a successful millinery business but then discovered her real gifts as a relentless campaigner for women's equal rights.  In 1871 she began publishing a weekly newspaper, The New Northwest, devoted to promoting not just suffrage but an entire agenda of women's issues. She benefited from the mentorship of the far more experienced Susan B. Anthony who visited the West Coast and traveled with Duniway throughout the Northwest.

You can imagine the fierce opposition women in the movement faced at that time.  Married women did not even have ownership of their own wardrobes. Despite staunch opposition from some of the most influential men in Oregon,  including her own brother and long-time editor of the Portland Oregonian, Harvey Scott, her victories ultimately came to pass.

Governor Oswald West asked Abigail to write the proclamation announcing Oregon's opening of the ballot box to women in 1912, eight years before the passage of the national amendment. Abigail Duniway had become one of the nation's most famous leaders of the Women's Suffrage movement.

And, she was the first woman to register to vote in Oregon.

Next up: Oswald West

The Union Forever

Between 1836 and 1884 about 12,000 immigrants made the 2000 mile journey from Independence, Missouri on the Oregon Trail. William Jay Bowerman, the University of Oregon's iconic one-time  coach of Track & Field and whose forebears came to Oregon in that migration, would tell his team members, "The cowards never started, the weak died along the way and that leaves us.  The men of Oregon."

Those were the men and women who, on February 14, 1859, brought Oregon into the Union. Those courageous women who survived that incredibly arduous experience were, of course, not allowed to vote as citizens of the new state.  Nor were African-Americans, Chinamen or Mulattos. But as America drifted toward the bitter, bloody chaos of the Civil War, Oregon joined the Union forbidding slavery.  It wasn't until August 26, 1920 that the 19th amendment to the Constitution finally gave women the right to vote and Oregon Suffragettes had played a leading role in that movement.

The Chinese, Mulattos, and African-Americans had to wait until 1927 for their deliverance to the ballot box.

Bowerman identified a culture in the state of Oregon that was shaped by those pioneers who crossed the plains and the mountains, forging rivers and, in some cases, resisting the welcoming committees of hostile Native-Americans.  That gritty code of the trail is evident in the way, from the beginning,  Oregonians vote on issues.  On the Trail, no person was an island.  Everyone was dependent for survival on the others in their party and that spirit of interdependence became an element of the Oregon culture.  In those early family farms surrounding the settlements, doors were left unlocked so a neighbor could get something needed if the owner was away.  This willingness to help a neighbor also became a part of the culture.

Why did Oregon voters time after time vote against allowing gas stations to put in self-service pumps?  The principal reason was to save jobs for their fellow citizens.  Oregon and New Jersey remain the only states to forbid self-service.

It would be an interesting study to discover what percentage of today's Oregonians are native-born compared to arrivals on the now friendly Oregon Trail. Whatever that number might be, the reality is there are lots more coming than there are going.  Coming soon: Who wins the Most Valuable Player trophy for the state's high achievers from 1859 to 2020?