BtJLL. 30] 



MISSIONS 



891 



of the work, which had already cost a 

 quarter of a million dollars. The Dalles 

 station was bought by the Presbyterians, 

 who now entered the same field (see Ban- 

 croft, Hist. Oreg., i, 1886). 



In the fall of 183(5 the Presbyterians, 

 under the leadership of Rev. Marcus 

 Whitman, established their first mission 

 in the Columbia region at Waiilatpu, now 

 Whitman, on Wallawalla r., s. e. Wash., 

 in territory claimed by the Cayuse tribe. 

 The site had been selected by an advance 

 agent, Rev. Samuel Parker, a few months 

 earlier. Rev. H. H. Spalding, of the same 

 party, about the same time, established a 

 mission among the Nez Perces at Lapwai, 

 on Clearwater r., a few miles above the 

 present Levviston, Idaho. Early in 1839 

 a second station was begun among the 

 Nez Perces at Kamiah, higher up the 

 Clearwater, but was discontinued in 1841. 

 Revs. E. Walker and C. C. Eells estab- 

 lished themselves at Chemakane, n. e. 

 Wash., on a lower branch of Spokane r., 

 among the Spokan. 



The Spokane, whose chief had been ed- 

 ucated among the whites, proved friendly, 

 but from the very beginning the Cayuse 

 and a considerable portion of the Nez 

 Perces maintained an insulting and hos- 

 tile attitude, the Cayuse particularly 

 claiming that the missionaries were in- 

 truders upon their lands and were in 

 league with the immigrants to dispossess 

 the Indians entirely. In consequence the 

 Kamiah station was soon abandoned. At 

 Waiilatpu, the main station, Whitman 

 was more than once in danger of personal 

 assault, the irritation of the Indians con- 

 stantly growing as the flood of immigrants 

 increased. In consequence of the contin- 

 ued opposition of the Cayuse and the Nez 

 Perces, the mission board in 1842 ordered 

 the abandonment of all the stations but 

 Chemakane. Whitman then crossed the 

 mountains to New York to intercede for 

 his mission, witli some degree of success, 

 returning the next year to find his wife a 

 refugee at one of the lower settlements, in 

 consequence of the burning of a part of 

 the mission property by the Cayuse, who 

 were restrained from open war only by 

 the attitude of the Government agent 

 and the Hudson's Bay Co.'s officers. 

 In the summer of 1847 the Cayuse and 

 neighboring tribes were wasted bj^ an 

 epidemic of measles and fever communi- 

 cated l)y passing imnngrant trains, all of 

 which made Waiilatpu a stopping point. 

 Two hundred of the Cayuse died within 

 a few weeks, while of the Nez Perces the 

 principal chief and 60 of his men fell vic- 

 tims. A rumor spread among the Cayuse 

 that Whitman had brought back the dis- 

 ease poison from the E. and unloosed it for 

 their destruction. The danger became so 

 imminent that, actuated partly also by 



the opposition of the mission board, he 

 decided to abandon \\'aiilatpu and remove 

 to the former Methodist station at The 

 Dalles, which he had already bought for 

 his own denomination. At the same time 

 he began negotiations with the Catholics 

 for their purchase of Waiilatpu. Before 

 the removal could be made, however, the 

 blow fell. On Nov. 29, 1849, the Cayuse 

 attacked Waiilatpu mission, killed Dr and 

 Mrs Whitman and 7 others and plundered 

 the mission property. Within a few 

 days thereafter, before the Indians dis- 

 persed to their camps, 4 others of the mis- 

 sion force were killed, making 13 mur- 

 dered, besides 2 children who died of 

 neglect, or 15 persons in all. The rest, 

 chiefly women, were carried off as pris- 

 oners and subjected to ^buse until rescued 

 by the effort of the Hudson's Bay Co., 

 a" month later. The Catholic Bishop 

 Brouillet, who was on his way from be- 

 low to confer with Whitman about the 

 sale of the mission property, was one of 

 the first to learn of the massacre, and 

 hastening forward was allowed to bury 

 the dead and then found opportunity to 

 send warning to the Lapwai mission in 

 time for Spalding and his party to make 

 their escape, some of them being shel- 

 tered by friendly Nez Perces, although 

 the mission buildings were plundered by 

 the hostiles. The Spokan chief, Garry, 

 remained faithful and gave the people at 

 Chemakane mission a bodyguard for their 

 protection until the danger was past. As 

 a resultof the Indian war which followed 

 the Presbyterian missions in the Colum- 

 bia region were abandoned. During the 

 brief period that the station at Kamiah 

 had continued, the missionary Rev. Asa 

 Smith had "reduced the Nez Perce dia- 

 lect to grammatical rules." In 1839 the 

 Lapwai mission received a small printing 

 outflt with which Spalding and his assist- 

 ants pi'inted small primers, hymns, and 

 portions of scripture in the language of 

 the tribe by the aid of native interpreters. 

 A Spokane primer of 1842, the joint work 

 of Walker and Eells, is said to have been 

 the third book printed in the Columbia 

 r. region. 



As we have seen, the first Christian 

 teaching among the tribes of the Colum- 

 bia region had come from the Catholic 

 employees of the Hudson's Bay Co., 

 through whose efforts many of the Nez 

 Perces, Flatheads, and others had volun- 

 tarily adopted the Christian forms as early 

 as 1820, and some years later sent dele- 

 gates to St Louis to make requests for 

 missionaries, to which the Methodists 

 were first to respond. In 1838 Father 

 Francis Blanchet and Modeste Demers 

 arrived at Ft Vancouver, Wash., on the 

 Columbia, from Montreal, to minister ]iar- 

 ticularly to the French einployetis of the 



