CHAPTER XIII.
Occupants of the country.—Danger to outsiders.—Description of missionaries.
In 1832, this entire country, from the Russian settlement on the north to the gulf of California on the south, the Rocky Mountains on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west, was under the absolute and undisputed control of the Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company; and the said company claimed and exercised exclusive civil, religious, political, and commercial jurisdiction over all this vast country, leaving a narrow strip of neutral territory between the United States and their assumed possessions, lying between the Rocky Mountains and the western borders of Missouri. Its inhabitants were gentlemen of the Hudson’s Bay Company,—their clerks, traders, and servants,—consisting mostly of Canadian-French, half-breeds, and natives.
Occasionally, when a venturesome Yankee ship or fur trader entered any of the ports of the aforesaid country for trade, exploration, or settlement, this honorable company asserted its licensed and exclusive right to drive said vessel, trader, explorer, or settler from it. Should he be so bold as to venture to pass the trained bands of the wild savages of the mountains, or, even by accident, reach the sacred trading-ground of this company, he was helped to a passage out of it, or allowed to perish by the hand of any savage who saw fit to punish him for his temerity.
While this exclusive jurisdiction was claimed and exercised by the company, four wild, untutored Indians of the Flathead tribe learned from an American trapper, who had strayed into their country, that there was a Supreme Being, worthy of worship, and that, by going to his country, they could learn all about him. Four of these sons of the wilderness found their way to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1832. Mr. Catlin, a celebrated naturalist and artist, I believe not a member of any religious sect, learned the object that had brought these red men from the mountains of Oregon, and gave the fact to the religious public.
This little incident, though small in itself, resulted in the organization, in 1833, of the Missionary Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the appointment of Rev. Jason Lee and associates, to the establishment of the Methodist Mission in the Wallamet Valley in 1834, the appointment of Rev. Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman, by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to explore the country in 1835, and the establishment of a mission by said Board in 1836.
Rev. Jason Lee, of Stansted, Canada East, a man of light hair, blue eyes, fair complexion, spare habit, above ordinary height, a little stoop-shouldered, with strong nerve and indomitable will, yet a meek, warm-hearted, and humble Christian, gaining by his affable and easy manners the esteem of all who became acquainted with him, was the first to volunteer.
Rev. Daniel Lee, a nephew of Jason, was the second;—the opposite of the former in every particular—of medium height. The general impression of outsiders was, that his moral qualities were not of the highest order, yet it is not known that any specific charges were ever brought against him.
Cyrus Shepard, a lay member, was a devoted Christian, and a faithful laborer for the advancement of the objects of the mission and the general welfare of all in the country. We have never learned that he had an enemy or a slanderer while he lived in it. On his first arrival he taught the Hudson’s Bay Company’s school at Vancouver, consisting of children belonging to persons in the employ of the company, till the mission buildings were ready, when he gathered a large school of Indian and French half-breed children, and was quite successful in teaching the rudiments of an English education. Rev. D. Lee and Mr. Shepard were from New England.