Oregon

NATIVE AMERICANS LIVED in Oregon for at least 15,000 years. In 1779, Captain James Cook explored the coast, and, in 1805–06, the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled through Oregon. Astoria, named after New York financier John Jacob Astor, was the first permanent white settlement. However, the area was contested by the British who wanted to control the fur trade in that region, an issue that was finally resolved in 1846 with the Oregon Treaty. On February 14, 1859, statehood was granted, and Oregon was admitted to the Union.

The first elected governor, John Whiteaker, from Indiana, had joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, ending up in Oregon, where he became active in the Democratic Party. He won the gubernatorial election by a large majority, gaining a margin of 1,138 votes, and was inaugurated on July 8, 1858, before the granting of statehood.

In the 1860 U.S. presidential election, Oregon voted narrowly for Abraham Lincoln, giving him 5,329 votes (36.1 percent) to 5,075 votes (34.4 percent) for John Breckinridge and 4,136 votes (28 percent) for Stephen Douglas. John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party finished in a distant fourth place, with 218 votes (1.5 percent). Whiteaker was a supporter of slavery, and the percentage vote for John Breckinridge was the second highest of the states that were neither southern nor border states, and the only northern state that Breckinridge nearly won.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1862, Republican candidate Addison C. Gibbs, from New York, was elected governor and raised soldiers from Oregon to serve in the war. In 1866, another Republican, George L. Woods, was elected governor. He remained in office until 1871, when La Fayette Grover, a Democrat, was elected governor; he resigned in 1877 to take a seat in the U.S. Senate, and his unexpired term was filled by Stephen F. Chadwick.