CHAPTER XII
Seeds of Christianity sown among the Indians by the Lewis and Clark Band.—A Deputation of Nez Percés to General Clark, requesting that the Bible be taught in their Nation.—The Methodists establish a Mission on the Willamette, but pass by the Nez Percés.—Interest in the New Field for Explorers and Missionaries is now awakened.—Marcus Whitman suited by Early Training to become an Explorer and a Missionary.—Becomes a Medical Practitioner and afterwards makes a Business Venture in a Sawmill.—His Character and Physique.—His First Trip to the West, in Company with Mr. Parker.—The Nez Percés and the Flatheads receive them gladly.—His Marriage at Prattsburg, N. Y., and Return to the West.—A Demand for Missionaries and Immigrants that Oregon may be occupied and held by the United States.—Whitman goes East to stimulate the Mission Board and to direct Immigration into Oregon.—Whitman publishes a Pamphlet on the Desirableness of Oregon for American Colonists.—Numerous Influences that brought about the Emigration of 1843.—Whitman's Outlook for the Future Prosperity of the Immigrants.—His Death and that of his Wife in the Massacre of 1847.
MARCUS WHITMAN: THE HERO OF OREGON
There is probably not another example of the springing to life of the seeds of Christianity more interesting than in the case of the Lewis and Clark expedition into that far country where rolls the Oregon. To what extent the scattering of this seed was performed with any serious expectation of success is not to be discovered; but it seems that wherever that strange-looking band of explorers and scientists fared and was remembered by the aborigines that came under its influence, so widely had there gone the legend of the white man's Saviour. The Indians heard that the white man had a "Book from Heaven" which told them the way to walk in order to know happiness and reach the happy hunting-grounds; with this race, which lived forever on the verge of starvation, the expression "happy hunting grounds"—land where there was always game to be obtained—meant far more than the hackneyed expression does to us to-day. A book giving explicit directions for reaching a place where there was always something to eat was a thing to be sought for desperately and long; they did not appreciate the argument, once advanced with no little acumen by a Wyandot Indian, that, since the Indian knew neither the art of writing nor that of book-making, the Great Spirit could never have meant them to find the way of life in a book. On the contrary, these western Indians—Flatheads and Nez Percés—held a great meeting, probably in the early Spring of 1832, and appointed two old men and two young men to go back and visit their "Father," General Clark, at St. Louis.
"I came to you," one of them is reported to have said to Clark when at last they reached St. Louis, "over a trail of many moons from the setting sun. You were the friend of my fathers, who have all gone the long way. I came with one eye partly open, for more light for my people who sit in darkness.... I am going back the long, sad trail to my people of the dark land. You make my feet heavy with burdens of gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, but the Book is not among them. When I tell my poor blind people, after one more snow, in the Big Council, that I did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go on the long path to the other hunting ground. No white men will go with them and no white man's Book to make the way plain." Two of the four Indians died in St. Louis, and the surviving two went West in the same caravan with George Catlin, the famous portrait painter, who included their portraits, it is said, in his collection,—Numbers 207 and 209 in the Catlin Collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
The first missionary effort in the Far West was put forth by the Methodist General Conference, which sent the Rev. Jason Lee westward, starting overland from Fort Independence in April, 1834. The mission was located seventy miles up the Willamette River, and, singularly enough, the Nez Percés, who had sent emissaries to the "men near to God," who had the "Book from Heaven," were passed by.