Excerpt from Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer<br><br>The early migrations to Oregon were nearly all of the farm ing class and composed of families. The Donation Act became. A law September 27, 1850, and it proved to be a domi nant factor in the early development of the Willamette Valley. Beginning with 1843, thousands of emigrants from the States in the Mississippi Valley, but mostly from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Arkansas, sold out their small holdings, put their wives and children into wagons and started for Oregon. For this reason the great disparity in the num bers of men and women did not exist there comparable to Washington and California.<br><br>California was admitted as a State in 1850, and almost the entire population was males, attracted there from all over the world by the discoveries of gold. Washington gained slowly in population during the quarter century following its sepa ration from Oregon. Until about 1860 nearly all the increase was on Puget Sound or west of the Cascade Mountains. Most of it was composed of loggers, millmen. Sailors, etc who were unmarried. The ratio of males to females was not less than nine to one.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.