Decentering Samuel Thurston in Understanding the History of Oregon

The Oregon Historical Society announced the 2023 Joel Palmer Award for the best article published in the Quarterly over the previous year. This year a German historian from Leipzig, Julius Wilm, won for his article, "Old Myths, Turned on Their Heads: Settler Agency, Federal Authority, and the Colonization of Oregon."

Samuel Thurston
IOOF Pioneer Cemetery
Memorial Day weekend

It was particularly interesting for the critique of the way we have understood Samuel Thurston.

It took until September 1850 to pass the Donation Land Claim Act (DLCA) to legalize existing claims and offer land donations to incoming settlers. The delay deeply frustrated White Oregonians, and when the territory’s first non-voting congressional delegate Samuel R. Thurston departed for Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1849, lobbying for a land law was on the top of his agenda. Authors of later retellings — even those critical of the policy — have greatly exaggerated Thurston’s part in getting the law passed and his input in its framing, widely crediting him with authoring the law or being central to its passage. “Samuel Thurston wrote the Donation Land Act,” a web exhibition on the Oregon Constitution commissioned by the state archives states matter-of-factly. Authors of the classic pioneer-centered hagiography put Thurston on a pedestal as yet another settler-savior who through sheer willpower, as Whitman and Jason Lee had previously, forced reluctant politicians in the metropole to help the White frontier community that was on the verge of being forgotten. Authors of more-recent studies attribute to Thurston the most egregious features of the DLCA — its disregard of Native land rights and exclusion of Black settlers — thereby separating those features from their origin in imperial power politics.

This central importance that historians attribute to Thurston is based on an isolated reading of sources that are not understood in their context nor in their inherent contradictions....The exaggerated agency that authors of both hagiographic and critical history attributed to Thurston obfuscates the role of national political imperatives in developing the law.

2023 Joel Palmer Award winner

This looks like an interesting debate! Maybe Thurston was more of a cog in the wheel than we have supposed. If you are interested in the pre-Statehood, settlement period, and have not already read the article, it is available for free from the website (link at top). Check it out.