Oregon

A territory jointly occupied by two countries for nearly thirty years, and a free state founded on explicit racial exclusion. The Oregon Country was claimed by Britain and the United States together from 1818, with the Hudson's Bay Company effectively governing it from Fort Vancouver, until the 1846 treaty divided it at the forty-ninth parallel - the slogan fifty-four forty or fight having been dropped once war with Mexico loomed. Some four hundred thousand people travelled the Oregon Trail from the 1840s, and the epidemics they brought had already reduced the Chinook and other peoples of the lower Columbia by an estimated nine-tenths. The provisional government and then the state constitution barred Black people from settling, the only state admitted with such a clause in its constitution, which was not fully repealed until 1926. Statehood came in 1859. Timber built the economy, salmon canning followed, and the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams brought cheap power and destroyed most of the salmon runs. Portland grew as a port and later as a planning experiment with an urban growth boundary. Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum system in 1902 and vote-by-mail in 1998. It has no sales tax. Salem is the capital and Portland the largest city. Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the country, formed in a collapsed volcano. Mount Hood is its highest point. The state is divided by the Cascades into a wet west and a dry east. It was the first state to legalise assisted dying, in 1994.

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