Samuel Royal Thurston

Samuel Royal Thurston (April 15, 1816 – April 9, 1851) was an American pioneer, lawyer, and politician who became the first delegate from the Oregon Territory to the United States Congress and was instrumental in the passage of the Donation Land Claim Act. He was born in Monmouth, Maine, and grew up in Peru, Maine. His father died when he was young, and Thurston’s early life was shaped by the circumstances of being raised without a father in rural Maine.

Thurston pursued higher education in New England, attending Dartmouth College before transferring to Bowdoin College in Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin with honors in 1843. After college, he read law under Robert Dunlap, a prominent Maine attorney and politician, thereby completing his legal training through apprenticeship rather than a formal law school. During his college years he met Elizabeth McLench, whom he married after his graduation. In 1845 the couple moved westward to Burlington, Iowa, where Thurston began his professional life on the American frontier.

In 1847 Thurston continued his westward migration, traveling over the Oregon Trail to the Oregon Country as an emigrant. He settled in Hillsboro in the Tuality District, where he established a law practice and quickly entered public life. In 1848 he was elected to the Provisional Legislature of Oregon from the Tuality District, serving alongside fellow Hillsboro resident David Hill. His legislative work during the provisional government period helped position him as a leading advocate for American settlement and legal organization in the region.

With the creation of the Oregon Territory, Thurston’s political prominence increased. In 1849 he was selected as the territory’s first delegate to the United States Congress, representing Oregon as a member of the Democratic Party. His single term in Congress occurred during a significant period in American history, as the nation grappled with westward expansion, questions of land tenure, and the status of new territories. As Oregon’s delegate, he participated in the democratic process at the federal level and worked to represent the interests of his territorial constituents, particularly with respect to land policy and the encouragement of American settlement.

Thurston’s major political achievement was his central role in framing and securing passage of the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. As Congressional delegate, he authored and promoted this legislation, which legitimized existing land claims in the Oregon Territory and granted 640 acres (2.6 km²) to each married couple who would settle on and cultivate the land for four years. The act was designed to encourage rapid American settlement and is widely regarded as a forerunner of the Homestead Act of 1862. In the struggle for control of Oregon lands, Thurston aligned himself with missionary Jason Lee and took a strong stance against John McLoughlin, chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver. For political reasons, he accused McLoughlin of thwarting American settlement and shaped the Donation Land Claim Act in a way that transferred McLoughlin’s Oregon City claim to the territorial legislature. Thurston and Lee made false statements about McLoughlin before the United States Supreme Court in an effort to discredit him publicly, contributing to the eventual denial of McLoughlin’s land claims to his homestead in Oregon City.

Thurston’s advocacy in Congress also reflected the racial and exclusionary policies that influenced Oregon’s early legal framework. In 1850 he delivered an address to Congress urging the prohibition of free African Americans from entering or settling in the Oregon Territory. He argued that the presence of free Black people would lead to intermarriage with Native Americans and the emergence of what he described as a mixed race “inimical to the whites,” asserting that “long bloody wars would be the fruits of the comingling of the races” and justifying such exclusion on grounds of “self preservation.” In order to prevent employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company from claiming land under the Donation Land Claim Act, Thurston further insisted that land claims be restricted to American citizens. He singled out Indigenous Hawaiian HBC employees in particular, describing them as “a race of men as black as your negroes of the South, and a race, too, that we do not desire to settle in Oregon.” While he argued that white men who left the Hudson’s Bay Company and became American citizens should be eligible for land claims, he maintained that Hawaiian men should not be eligible, thereby reinforcing racially discriminatory aspects of territorial land policy.

After his term of service in Washington, Thurston began the journey back to Oregon by way of the Isthmus of Panama. While returning via Panama in 1851, he contracted a tropical fever. His health had been weakened by what contemporaries described as “arduous labors at Washington,” and he suffered from a malignant fever associated with the Isthmus, followed by a severe attack of diarrhea and complications from a longstanding liver ailment. He died on April 9, 1851, eight days out from Panama, off Acapulco, Mexico, while aboard the steamer California. His body was initially interred at Acapulco.

Two years after his death, by an act of the Oregon Legislature, Thurston’s remains were brought back to the territory he had represented in Congress. He was reburied in Salem Pioneer Cemetery in Salem, Oregon. His gravestone bears the inscription: “Here rests Oregon’s first delegate, a man of genius and learning. A lawyer and statesman. His devotions equaled his wide philanthropy, his public acts are his best eulogium.” In recognition of his role in the early political development of the Pacific Northwest, Thurston County, Washington—originally part of the Oregon Territory and now containing the state capital, Olympia—was named in his honor.