At Chemawa, the seat of an Indian training-school, the President reviewed the pupils and, in response to calls for a speech, addressed them as follows:
My Young Friends—It gives me great pleasure to stop for a moment to see these evidences of the good work the Government is doing for you and the good work you are doing for yourselves. All the purposes of the Government toward you and your people are benevolent and friendly. It is our wish that you may become such people as your neighbors are—industrious, kindly, peaceful, and self-respecting. Everything that I can do to promote this end will be gladly done. I hope your instructors and all those who are brought close to you will in every way express and carry out the benevolent and kindly intentions of the Government.
[OREGON CITY, OREGON, MAY 5.]
A cordial greeting was accorded the President at Oregon City by the pioneers and army veterans. The Committee of Reception was Hon. J. T. Apperson, Hon. H. E. Cross, Hon. T. W. Sullivan, and T. Rands. From beneath a triumphal floral arch near the station the Mayor delivered a welcoming address, closing with three cheers.
The President, in response, said:
Fellow-citizens—This is a very pleasant morning reception. The heartiness and genuineness of your greeting is unmistakable, and I beg to assure you that we most heartily appreciate and return your kindly thoughts. You have here a most important State, one of those bordering on the Pacific, completing the autonomy of our great country, and giving us a seaboard on the Pacific as well as upon the Atlantic which was essential to our completeness and separateness as a people. The interesting story of the early settlement of Oregon, of the international contest which for some time threatened international war, is fresh in the minds of these pioneers, and I am sure is taught to these children of your public schools. The work of those who set up the American flag here, and who secured to us this fertile region, is worthy of mention and of honorable commemoration by this generation, which is entering into their labors. Your State has added another to that succession of kindly greetings which began when we left the national capital. We have come out of the land of irrigation and roses into this land where the Lord takes care of the crops; and this dependence upon the seasons is not without its instructive and moral influences. Nature seems to have made a fresh, white toilet for us as we have come down the banks of this beautiful river. To the pioneers, to those who have entered in with less labor to the inheritance left to them, to these children and to these comrades of the Grand Army, I give my most hearty greeting.