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The Cockstock Affair
- Oregon State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
53 The Cockstock Affair Oregon’s 1844 exclusion law was at least in part a knee-jerk response to a perceived threat of racial violence—how large a part is debatable. The threat allegedly came from a free black named James Saules, who had been arrested for his role in what became known as the Cockstock Affair. Saules had been a cook, or a cabin boy, on the USS Peacock, a sloop-of-war used as an exploration ship that broke up on the Columbia River bar near Astoria in July 1841.1 The entire crew was saved. Saules chose to stay in Oregon where he subsequently married a Native American woman. In 1844, Saules and a Native American named Cockstock—a member of the Wasco tribe—fell into an angry dispute over a horse. The horse allegedly had been promised to Cockstock by another free black, Winslow Anderson, as payment for work on Anderson’s farm; Anderson was a former fur trapper who had lived in Oregon since 1834. However, Anderson sold his farm and horse to Saules, who declined to turn the horse over to Cockstock.2 The dispute escalated into violence when Cockstock appeared near Oregon City with several tribal members on or about March 4, 1844, and a fight broke out, involving arrows and guns. Cockstock and two white men, Sterling Rogers and George LeBreton, were killed. LeBreton was clerk and recorder for the provisional government. According to one version, Cockstock may have been killed by Anderson.3 Local whites blamed Saules and Anderson for the incident and threatened Saules’ life. Saules was taken into custody and both he and Anderson were “encouraged’’ to leave the area. They moved to Clatsop County in northwestern Oregon.4 Yet another version—the facts are impossible to pin down—was that Saules threatened to incite his wife’s people to “a great interracial war’’ unless he was released. That Saules on his own could rally Native Americans to such violence is, in retrospect, improbable. But improbability was beside the point. The incident “triggered further racist sentiment’’ among settlers already hostile toward blacks.5 The Cockstock affair and other incidents in which Saules was involved led the resident Indian agent, Elijah White, to recommend to his superiors in Washington, D.C., that African Americans be banned from Oregon as “dangerous subjects.’’ Writing on May 1, 1844, to Secretary of War J. M. Porter, White noted that he had sent—in effect, banished—Saules to live in 54 d D Breaking Chains present-day Clatsop County following the Cockstock incident. White said that although Saules remains in that vicinity with his Indian wife and family, conducting [behaving], as yet, in a quiet manner, but doubtless ought to be transported, together with every other negro, being in our condition dangerous subjects. Until we have some further means of protection their immigration ought to be prohibited. Can this be done?6 One historian has written that while the Cockstock incident itself was the “immediate impetus’’ for the 1844 exclusion law, the greater influence was probably White’s letter urging action to exclude blacks.7 The law was enacted in June, three months after the incident. In the words of Quintard Taylor, a University of Washington historian, the significance of the exclusion law should be seen more “as a symbol of the evolving attitude toward future black migration, than as a measure that would immediately eliminate or reduce the ‘troublesome’ black population.’’8 That Anderson and Saules could avoid punishment by moving to a less populated area illustrated the ineffectiveness of provisional laws. d D Although the legislative committee abolished the 1844 exclusion law in 1845, the first territorial legislature enacted a new exclusion law in September 1849. Once again, fear of an alliance between blacks and the tribes was a contributing cause, or at least an excuse. Fear of the tribes was heightened by the massacre of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and eleven others, on November 29, 1847, by members of the Cayuse tribe at the Whitman mission near Walla Walla. The preamble to the new law declared it would be “highly dangerous to allow free Negroes and mulattoes to reside in the Territory, or to intermix with Indians, instilling into their minds feelings of hostility toward the white race.’’9 The law easily passed the House of Representatives by a vote of twelve to four on September 19, but it was challenged in the nine-member Council. Wilson Blain of the then...