We have frequently met individual Indians from about all those early stations, and found a most cordial greeting from them, and always a regret that they have lost their Boston teachers.
We have always regretted the course pursued by the American Board, in allowing those missions to be given up, as unwise and injudicious. If the men who first commenced them had not the courage to return and continue their labors, others should have been sent to take their places.
The Whitman Institute has come up from the ashes of that noble and devoted martyred missionary, which to the writer looks like “white-washing the sepulchers of the prophets” whose death we have seemed to approve, by our silence (not to say cowardice) in not ferreting out and exposing the authors of that crime.
Mr. Spalding has not been sustained in his recent efforts among the Nez Percés, but feels that he has been driven away from among his Indian brethren and disciples by Jesuit influence.
The cowardly, timid, hesitating, the half-God and half-mammon Christian may say, What will you have us do? We answer, Maintain the natural rights of men and Christians, and leave consequences to a higher power.
We have thus briefly summed up the labors of the Protestant and Roman missions, and shown the influence of each upon the Indians on the western portion of our American continent. In further proof that this Roman Jesuit influence tends only to the destruction of the Indian race, I might refer to California, Mexico, and other countries where they have had the exclusive religious teaching of the people; the result is the same.
We know from long experience that it has always been the policy of the Hudson’s Bay Company to place an opposing post or trader by the side of an opponent in the fur trade. The same policy was adopted, and carried out by the Jesuits in regard to the Protestant missions in American territory. We will be told that the Hudson’s Bay Company people were principally of the English Episcopal Church. This is true, and they, to satisfy the Christian sentiment of the English people, brought an Episcopal minister to Vancouver, and allowed a few in the vicinity of Moose Factory, when they wished to renew their fur license, but dismissed them as soon as possible after their object was accomplished, for reasons already stated, and introduced these Jesuit missionaries for no other purpose than to facilitate their trade among the Indians, and destroy the American influence in the country. But, thank God and the energy of a free people, the country, with all its untold wealth and prospective grandeur, is ours, and to-day, as we hear the lightning tap of intelligence, from the Old World to Oregon, we have not one solitary regret that thirty of the best and most active years of our life have been spent, in contending publicly and privately, by day and by night, in season and out of season, against that influence. We know what it is to feel its power, as an assistant missionary, as a settler, as a representative and as an officer of the provisional, Territorial, and State governments. We have no complaint of personal unkindness to us, or ours; but we feel that the withering condemnation of every true American, and Englishman too, should rest upon the Hudson’s Bay Company while that name is claimed by any association of men, for the unrighteous course they have been, and still are, pursuing.
It is obvious that to the American missionaries our nation owes an honorable record, and the names of Dr. Whitman, Rev. J. Lee, Mr. C. Shepard, Mr. C. Rogers, Rev. Harvey Clark, Mr. A. Beers, and Dr. Wilson, and Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Spalding, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Leslie, Mrs. Beers, and Mrs. Smith, among the dead, and many others still living, should find a prominent place in the catalogue of noble men and women who not only volunteered to civilize and Christianize the Indians, but did actually save this western golden coast, to honor and enrich the great Republic in the time of her greatest peril.
It would be ungenerous to confine the answer to our question alone to the good that the early American missionaries did to the Indians of our western coast. The whole country, now within the jurisdiction of the United States, is more indebted to them than most men are willing to admit.
The country, as all are aware, was first occupied by Astor’s Company in 1811, followed by the Northwest Company in 1813, and by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821. For twenty-three years the British Hudson’s Bay Company was scarcely disturbed by an American. No effort was made by it to comply with the conditions of its charter, in regard to the civil and religious instruction of the Indians, supposing that charter to have been valid.