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"Trophies" for God

Native Mortality, Racial Ideology, and the Methodist Mission of Lower Oregon, 1834 – 1844

GRAY H. WHALEY

IN 1831, A GROUP OF NEZ PERCE and Flathead Indians reversed the familiar story of the American West by venturing eastward from the Columbia Plateau to St. Louis, the Americans' "gateway to the West." Unfortunately, St. Louis residents did not record much information about the Indians' visit east. According to one account by the Christian Advocate published two years later, however, the Nez Perce and Flatheads had requested instruction in the Bible. This belated claim caused a considerable stir. Many Americans were swept up in a religious revival movement now known as the "Second Great Awakening." These evangelical Christians believed that the Holy Spirit could live within them if they adhered to a doctrinal view of the Gospel, made the Word central to all their thoughts and actions, and exhorted the benefits of such a life to fellow Christians and non-Christians alike. Ideally, they could convert the world to this true faith and begin the new millennium. In the excitement over the Nez Perces' and Flatheads' supposed call for the Bible, the Methodist Mission Society attempted the expensive proposition of a mission in the little-known and distant "lower Oregon Country" — the vast expanse surrounding the lower and middle Columbia River of present-day Oregon and Washington — and dispatched Rev. Jason Lee. 1
      In 1834, Lee situated his initial mission station upriver from Willamette Falls, a comfortable distance from Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company establishment near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. His Willamette Valley location was far from the lands of the Nez Perce and Flathead, but he chose it largely for its suitability for a mission colony and an agricultural school. In the first decade, a more substantial central station was established nearby at present-day Salem and other stations were added at Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia River, Willamette Falls, Nisqually on Puget Sound, and The Dalles on the middle Columbia. 2


 
Figure 1
    A sketch of the Willamette Mission House, established by Rev. Jason Lee in 1834

    OHS neg., OrHi 46192
 


 
      Despite the "clarion call" heralded by the Christian Advocate, Lee did not find a Native population clamoring for the Bible. Instead, the Methodists encountered people reeling from malaria epidemics that had begun in 1830. Their population continued to decline significantly for years because of inadvertently introduced diseases for which they had no immunities or effective treatments. As a result of the cataclysmic demise of the Native population, Lee adjusted his expectations: while the majority of Indians were doomed, some could be saved to take their place in Christian America as "trophies."1 Generally, however, their "blood" would only be preserved through "amalgamation" (interracial marriage).2 Still, he never lost faith in the mission's goal of "saving" the Native people of Oregon. 3
      Lee's faith was not shared by all the missionaries. Other problems for the mission effort resulted because most Indians were simply disinterested in substituting a new religion and way of life for their own, and their several languages and dialects frustrated the missionaries who spoke only English. The Indians' demographic collapse and frustrations with limited conversions weakened the resolve of some missionaries, particularly those of the "reinforcement" of 1840. Within a couple of years, these missionaries sought to close the Mission, arguing that Indians would be replaced by Euro-Americans. The view that Christians were destined to possess American lands and that Indians were destined to disappear dated back to Puritan New England in the 1600s.3 Two hundred years later, the history of the eastern United States and emerging beliefs about race added weight to it. By 1843, critics of the Oregon Mission believed that Native extinction was inevitable and, unlike Lee, that the mission was a lost cause. 4
      Both Lee and his detractors drew on racialism, the growing body of folk beliefs and pseudo-science that attempted to explain perceived differences among peoples by their inherent physical traits. By the late 1700s, human differences once thought to be ethnic or cultural (i.e., Christian versus heathen or civilized versus barbarian) came to be seen as fixed by biological "race." Lee's racial beliefs were relatively benign insofar as he still saw a future for Indian people and wanted to help them survive. His critics wielded race more dangerously, rationalizing extinction and colonization as biologically inevitable and divinely sanctioned. The reason for the ascendancy of racialism lies with the changing demographics of western Oregon: Native depopulation and the arrival of Euro-American "settlers" — or, from the Indians' perspective, "unsettlers." Land and resource control became the primary focus in the 1840s, and Jacksonian Americans did not extend frontier property rights to Indians when they wanted their lands. The Indian peoples who had survived conquest east of the Mississippi and who were being forced into the then-undesirable "Indian Territory" of modern-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska could certainly attest to these beliefs. Euro-American emigrants carried their self-serving, racial attitudes westward. In 1844, with the Oregon land rush underway, the mission to the Indians of western Oregon became a mission to foster a Christian American colony, and the excuses provided by racialism facilitated and rationalized the change. 5
      Native people of the Northwest had relatively little experiences with massive epidemics before 1830, and they certainly did not share the belief that they were destined to die off to make way for Euro-American colonization. The smallpox outbreaks of the late 1700s provided the Oregon Indians' sole base of knowledge of epidemic disease. These outbreaks struck some populations brutally while sparing others, and smallpox temporarily left the region for a generation. Without a history of pathogens and epidemics, Indians could not know why they struck, why they left, and, hence, why malaria ravaged them in the 1830s. Some Indian people welcomed the missionaries initially, following a tradition of seeking power from new sources to maintain health, wealth, and comity among individuals and communities. The Nez Perce and Flatheads who ventured to St. Louis probably had such a motive, being familiar with Westerners and, to some extent, Christianity because of the fur trade. Many Oregon Indians were open to the idea that the missionaries might be useful, and their subsequent interactions with the missionaries were greatly shaped by their changing beliefs about the newcomers' power against and relation to disease. They soon found, however, that the missionaries were not much help. Western knowledge about disease still lacked crucial understandings about microbiology, communicability, and cures.4 In the nineteenth century, Westerners caught only glimpses of the truth through the lens of early modern science, and they filled the gaps in their knowledge with racialism and rationalizations that often hurt rather than helped Indian people. 6
      In addressing the mission history in this manner, this essay does not discount the crucial roles of politics, economics, and personal ambitions and animosities long noted by historians. Instead, it adds the crucial component of how the Methodist missionaries' understandings of disease and depopulation affected their decisions to establish, conduct, and abandon the Oregon Mission. Only through an examination of race and racialization can these decisions be fully understood.

 7
THE METHODIST MISSION in the Willamette Valley was the first religious station in the Oregon Country, joining the region to a history of almost two hundred years of Anglo evangelical missions that had attempted to Christianize and "civilize" (assimilate) Native Americans. The Oregon Mission was part of an expansion of American missions to distant places in the 1820s and 1830s, an expansion that was spurred by the Second Great Awakening, a renewed sense of Christian millennialism that swept the United States. The religious fervor led the devout to open their purse strings and allowed evangelical societies to dispatch mission families to Indian Territory, Hawaii, Africa, China, and — in 1834 — Oregon.5 8
      Jason Lee began his mission filled with the promise of bringing the region and its inhabitants into the realm of Christianity. His first contact was late in the summer of 1834. Wailaptulikt, a Cayuse man, was returning with a hunting party from the bison country when he met Lee and his small band of Methodists on their way to Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company's headquarters on the lower Columbia River. Wailaptulikt and his fellow Cayuse and Wallawalla hunters accompanied the mission party to their home on the Columbia Plateau. According to Lee, Thomas McKay, a mixed-blood Iroquois and HBC trapper, explained to the Indians "what we are and our object in coming to this country and they were very much pleased ... more so when told there was a prospect of our locating at [the HBC's fort] Wallah-wallah."6 Lee chose the Willamette Valley over the "upper country" for the Methodists' principal station, but that choice did not end contact with his new acquaintances from the Plateau. 9
      Two years later, Wailaptulikt made a decision to bring his family to the new mission in the Willamette Valley, arriving in July 1836. Wailaptulikt put his five children under the care of Cyrus Shepard, the lay schoolmaster, who taught them and sixteen other Native "mission family" members, including Kalapuyans, Chinookans, Iroquois, mixed bloods, a Tillamook, and a Chehalis (five others had already died, and two had left). Thanks to introductions by Wailaptulikt and his hunting party in 1834, Lee had also established a relationship with Piupiumaksmaks ("Yellow Serpent"), a Wallawalla leader who had risen to power and influence with the Plateau fur trade. Piupiumaksmaks visited Lee in August 1836 and entrusted the mission with his eldest son, Toayahnu. The Methodists christened him "Elijah," indicating both the hope that Native converts would return to their people as evangelists and, likely, their respect for Mission Board director Elijah Hedding. Unlike Piupiumaksmaks, Wailaptulikt stayed at the mission station with his children.7 10
      Native motives for bringing children to the mission varied from desperation to the promise of power. Lee arrived four years into the annual cycle of disease that devastated the region's Indian population. Orphans accounted for several of the early mission family members, including the three Iroquois children of trapper Shangarati and their slaves, who the missionaries had freed. In addition, two children were ill when they arrived; their poor health was the reason they were given over to the Methodists' care. In one respect, the Willamette mission house played a similar role for the Native people of Oregon as the Christian orphanages and almshouses did for the poor in the United States. In the case of Toayahnu, Wailaptulikt's children, Kokallah (a Tillamook boy), and Lintwa (a Kalapuya boy), Indian people also sought some benefit through their children's exposure to the newcomers. The Cayuse and Wallawalla had been impressed with Lee's healing abilities, his emotional (if incomprehensible) sermons, and his gifts. They gave him a few prized horses and considered the Methodists important new players in the region. They even had Lee sign a contract of sorts, a promising agreement that likely explains their subsequent arrival at the mission.8 11
      Clearly, however, Indian people did not understand who or what the Methodists were, despite Lee's faith in Thomas McKay's translation, which was likely delivered in Chinook jargon. As Lee and other mission members consistently complained, the language gap greatly distanced the eastern exhorters from their potential Native converts. Through layers of interpreters and, increasingly, the limited Chinook jargon, the Methodists tried and mostly failed to spread the Gospel and convey the supposed benefits of Christian-American civilization. Translation is inherently an act of interpretation, an imprecise endeavor to match words to concepts that may not exist in the other language. With an almost mystical belief in the power of the Word (despite prior interpretations from Aramaic to ancient Greek to competing versions in English), evangelicals seemed to believe that the Gospel was powerful enough to overcome language barriers and Native recalcitrance.9

 12


 
Figure 2
    Rev. Jason Lee, who established the first religious station in Oregon Country in 1834

    OHS neg., OrHi 8342
 


 
FOR SOME, PARTICULARLY OF the 1840 reinforcement, the failure of this power led to frustration, personal anguish, hostility, and calls to abandon the mission. Rev. Gustavus Hines, after resigning from the Oregon Mission, traveled to Protestant missions in Hawaii, the Philippines, China (Canton and Hong Kong), and South Africa and used his experiences to plead with the Methodist Mission Board to tell the truth to their evangelical donors: the Bible's inherent power was insufficient to change the beliefs and behaviors of non-Western "heathens." According to Hines, the Kalawatsets of the lower Umpqua River thought the missionaries talked to God, an ill-understood action that they eagerly anticipated and crowded around to witness. Some Clatsops, according to Rev. John Frost, believed that the missionaries were "being[s] of a different order" who could "pray," an alien practice that the Clatsops did not believe Indians capable of and that had no relevance for them. At one point, the Clatsops dismissed convert Celiast ("Helen Smith") and her claims that she could pray and worried that Christian prayer would offend the crucial Chinook salmon run. According to Rev. William Kone and Rev. Daniel Lee, Indians at both Willamette Falls and Wascopam (The Dalles) expected payment for prayer, viewing their participation in camp meetings as a service to the missionaries.10 13
      Throughout the region, at least by the late 1830s, many Native first-fruits and puberty ceremonies necessarily included visitors who helped ensure the success of the various rites. The visitors, often from distant villages and crossing linguistic and ethnic lines, were given gifts for their participation and assistance in dancing and conjuring.11 Indians tried to fit the Methodist newcomers and their ways into existing categories of meaning. The Cayuse and Wallawalla, east of the Cascades, attempted to work the missionaries into the pre-existing colonial relations of the fur trade. Religious scholars call this process indigenization, the incorporation of new ideas or technologies without the underlying cultural assumptions of Christianity. Such was the case when Lee first encountered the Plateau people. They tested his abilities, then gave him horses and requested that he sign his name to a document, which he did. In at least one case, Natives blended the introduced religion with their own religious practices. A new syncretic form of Christian and Native beliefs was clearly evident by 1836 when a Hudson's Bay Company official witnessed the first recorded Wáashat ceremony, which evidenced both Plateau Sahaptian spiritual beliefs and elements of Christian services and hymnal cadences.12 14
      In the Oregon Country and elsewhere, Natives had long exchanged beliefs and practices, incorporating different aspects into their existing spiritualities. Such fluidity was anathema to institutional religions such as the evangelical Christianity of the nineteenth century. The predominant Protestant denominations — including Methodists, Baptists (who were not yet present in Oregon), and the combined efforts of the Congregationalists and Presbyterians (the American Board of Foreign Missions) — mostly rejected compromise regarding their beliefs about God and evangelism. Local Native customs, however, joined with neighboring practices to form regional networks such as the guardian spirit dances of the Greater Lower Columbia, the Wáashat of the Plateau, and the so-called world-renewal cult of the California-Oregon borderlands. When Native people encountered newcomers, they sought to gain from the interaction. They did not make the same distinctions among spirituality, political economy, and kinship as Westerners did — hence, the missionaries' frustrations with Native expectations regarding their cooperation in prayer meetings. Without fully comprehending what the Methodists espoused, Indian people sought new knowledge and power as additions to, not replacements of, their beliefs. Conversely, when they did not see any useful benefit forthcoming or the situation seemed too precarious, they withdrew or took their children away. One Kalapuya family sent their boy, Lintwa, to the mission in November 1834 to learn from the newcomers. After getting sick, Lintwa returned to his village and was cured there. Subsequently, he rejoined the mission, but he (and probably his family) had lost much respect for the missionaries. According to Jason Lee, Lintwa "became unsteady & when told that he must either mind or leave the mission he preferred the latter."13 Many of those who stayed with the mission had few alternatives.

 15
CHRISTIAN EVANGELISM DIFFERED fundamentally from the Native practices of indigenizing and syncretizing new beliefs and practices. Evangelicals attempted to persuade indigenous people to abandon their beliefs and lives in favor of the Gospel — the Word was the Truth, no compromise. Even among Christians, evangelicals tolerated no sway. Rev. Henry Perkins railed: "I insist on holiness ... holiness is something different from common religion.... [which] is a mixture, & all common christians may say in truth 'To good & evil equal bent, I'm half a devil, half a saint.'" A minister's duty was to prevent such "backsliding" and save erstwhile Christians from Hell, hence the advocacy of regular Bible meetings. Rev. Alvan Waller extended such intransigence to Indians at the Wascopam station, preventing them from trading horses on the Sabbath and making some "quite angry." That the Native traders complied with the wildly gesticulating missionary demonstrated to Waller that he was doing God's work.14 16
      The Oregon Methodists generally followed a traditional, exclusivist mode of religious conversion, which Antonio Gualtieri has termed "theological imperialism," wherein Native spiritual beliefs are repudiated in "a strategy of radical displacement." To create what historian Robert Berkhofer called a "New Jerusalem in the forest," Protestant missionaries had to depose and supplant the Native economies and the cultures that gave them meaning. Berkhofer explained: "The spread of the true faith ... could only come at the expense of traditional native life." For "religion in addition to being a philosophy of the unknown is a system for ranking basic values, and thus a new religion implies new behavior ... true Indian conversion meant nothing less than a total transformation of native existence." Many Indians rejected the totality and radicalism of the Christian mission. Later, some accepted Christianity on their own terms, by practicing both Catholicism and the Warm House Dance at Grand Ronde, for example, or joining the regional, syncretic Indian Shaker Church.15

 17
THOUGH CLASHES OVER evangelical totality and Native spiritual inclusiveness were important, disease and depopulation affected the Willamette Mission more. Tragedy struck the mission quickly and often, undermining both Native and Methodist goals and contributing to the eventual collapse of Native-colonial comity. Of the eighteen Indians who joined the mission along the Willamette River in 1834 and 1835, eight died by 1838. Mortality improved for the thirty-four who arrived between 1836 and June 1838, with only two deaths, but the mortality rate over the first five years was still 20 percent.16 These deaths do not include local mixed-blood children who attended the Sabbath School. Partly because of the mission's deadly reputation, six children left, successfully "absconded," or were taken away by their parents by mid-1838. As one Hudson's Bay Company officer recalled: "Every fall the Indians were excited as to what new ill was to come — Whooping cough, measles, Typhoid fever &c ... All these things we think so lightly of now — scourged the poor Indians dreadfully."17 18


 
Figure 3
    Rev. Alvan Waller, while stationed at The Dalles, holding a large Bible

    Hamilton Campbell, photographer. OHS neg., OrHi 391
 


 
      Anthropologist Robert Boyd has argued that it was a depleted supply of victims that largely ended the annual death toll from malaria between 1830 and 1834. He estimates that from 1805 to 1841 the lower Chinookan and Kalapuyan peoples declined from perhaps 15,545 people to 1,932 (88 percent). Contemporaries described the gruesome toll, noting abandoned villages that had bustled with human activity and bodies piled high on memaloose illahee— the isles of the dead — on the middle Columbia River. Demographic information for Indians who lived south and west of Fort Vancouver, the Willamette Mission, and the lower Willamette and Coast Range settlements is much less reliable. Even without solid population figures, however, we know that Native peoples from northern California through western Oregon were similarly ravaged. Epidemics followed trade routes, and physical curing practices often unwittingly helped along the virgin-soil epidemics, in which human populations with no exposure to certain microbes develop no immunities to them and suffer enormously when exposed. Sweats followed by plunges into cold water, for example, further weakened fevered victims. Malaria carried off many elders and traditional leaders, having both short- and long-term consequences on Native communities.18 19
      Throughout the Oregon Country, Indians suspected that unrecognized or inexplicable illnesses were caused by people wielding malevolent power, creating distrust and friction. This is not surprising. Without historical experience with large-scale deaths from epidemics, they made sense of death on an individual basis. For lower Chinookans, for example, inexplicable illnesses resulted from "the intrusion of a foreign object ... the agency of a malignant shaman, [or] soul loss...."19 Certain individuals were credited with spiritual powers that could conjure and project illness-causing agents, and similarly empowered individuals could remedy the sick person. By failing, however, a medicine person risked retribution, fines, or even death from aggrieved kinfolk. As late as 1857, Grand Ronde agent John Miller cited "frequent serious quarrels" over what were considered failures by traditional medicine people; in one instance, the Takelmas had a bloody altercation or "open warfare" with the Umpquas. Schoolmaster John Ostrander reported that one "doctress," in an attempt to save her life when aggravated relatives tried to kill her, blamed the school's trumpet for emitting sickness like "a mist" that settled "upon the camp." At a headman's request, Ostrander had agreed not to sound his trumpet, sarcastically stating that he "was not such a monster ... so the Indians 'still live.'" Siletz agent R.B. Metcalfe stated that the people "live in constant terror of their doctors and doctresses...." He claimed that he knew "more than one hundred doctors and doctresses murdered, and many of them by the hands of their own brothers." His figure was certainly an exaggeration; one soldier, for example, put the figure at six killed over thirty months. The death tolls from unknown diseases clearly had effects beyond individual deaths; they were assaulting Native belief systems and producing tremendous fear. Metcalfe compared the situation to the Salem witch trials, which also had occurred during a time of social upheaval. As late as 1871, former Superintendent of Indian Affairs Joel Palmer complained that "superstitious" ideas "that their 'medicine-men' can 'will' their death" were still maintained.20 "Doctor killings," however, had apparently stopped. 20
      Indians sometimes blamed disease on Westerners. One widely disseminated story among the Indians blamed the American coaster, the Owyhee, for initiating the "fever and ague," or malaria, in 1830. Robert Boyd notes that the notion that non-Indians' could produce disease from a bottle dates back to 1811, when Duncan McDougall supposedly threatened to unleash smallpox from a vial among the Clatsop and Chinook. This story of McDougall as the "smallpox chief," however, is from Washington Irving; no contemporary records support it. In the 1830s, Captain Dominus of the Owyhee and other American sailors apparently relayed the tale of their powers to bring smallpox northward to intimidate Makah traders at Cape Flattery; the tale was commonly retold around Puget Sound. The pervasiveness of the tale is further evidenced by the Kalawatsets of the lower Umpqua in 1840 and their concern regarding Jason Lee's shot pouch, which he wore around his neck. According to the Methodists' translator, the Kalawatset wife of company trader Jean Gagnier, the Indians thought he bore deadly magic. Still, they refrained from their supposed plot to kill Lee and Hines preemptively.21 In fact, Native people opted not to take traditionally justified retribution until late 1847, when a group of Wallawalla and Cayuse men took revenge in the so-called Whitman Massacre.

 21
IN MARCH 1837, WAILAPTULIKT'S youngest son, "Samuel," died of the "fever and ague." His daughter Tshecooitch ("Clarissa Perkins") lay ill with the same sickness. Wailaptulikt gathered his surviving children and left the Willamette Mission, though Tshecooitch died shortly after arriving at Fort Vancouver.22 Infamously, in 1847, the killings at the Whitman Mission resulted from a measles epidemic and the gulf of misunderstandings between ABCFM missionaries and a group of Cayuse, Wallawalla, and Shoshone. Piupiumaks-maks played an integral if unintended role. He led the trade excursion to John Sutter's fort that unwittingly brought back the disease.23 22
      It is unclear to what extent Native beliefs about death and disease affected the actions of the Oregon missionaries before the Whitmans were murdered. In 1840, Rev. John Frost cited the common Indian belief that disease was human-caused to explain his refusal to administer medicine among sick Clatsops. He feared retribution if the patient died and claimed that his inaction was an official policy of the Oregon Mission. Jason Lee, however, freely treated Native patients from the time he entered the Oregon Country in 1834 until he left in 1844. Perhaps Lee distrusted Frost's abilities or had some specific reason to give him a temporary order, but Frost likely gave it as an excuse to cover his inaction. Lee repeatedly petitioned the Methodist Mission Board for a professional doctor and eventually did secure the services of Dr. Ira Babcock for a limited time. Rev. Alvan Waller explained that Indians at Wascopam indigenized Western medicine. Without knowledge about the new illnesses afflicting their people, some Native doctors apparently waited until Waller determined whether a person was curable before they tried a cure, or they took the credit, which Waller insisted was owed to Western medicine not their "juggling."24 Regardless, the missionaries and laymen barely succeeded in maintaining their own health, let alone stemming the tide of death among Indians. 23


 
Figure 4
    Stum-Ma-Nu, a Chinook also known as William Brooks, who traveled to New York with Jason Lee in 1839

    OHS neg., OrHi 77340
 


 
      Like Natives who experimented with the mission, the Methodists fit their observations into existing categories of understanding. Before the arrival of significant numbers of settler-colonists who brought racialism to the forefront, the Methodists interpreted Native deaths in light of evangelical Christianity. Waller became indignant when the relatives of a deceased man of the Wascopam refused Christian burial, instead taking the body to "a rock island in the midst of the Dalls." He complained that they were too distracted arranging the property of the dead to attend his service; they were not persuaded that they were dooming the soul of the deceased. With so few healthy Native converts, the missionaries instead lauded "happy deaths," in Daniel Lee's words; that is, they applauded deaths when Indian victims exhibited signs of conversion on their death beds. Teacher Hamilton Campbell praised the death of an Indian girl named "Harriet" this way: "she died a bright ornament of our holy Religion — she died shouting glory to god...." Layperson Chloe Clark explained that dying a convert would "reserve these poor degraded souls, from the death which never dies." The "happy death" mentality was widespread and was a common reaction to mortality among evangelicals. The North American, a Philadelphia newspaper, provided a eulogy of one of Oregon's few celebrated converts, Stum-Ma-Nu, "William Brooks," a young Chinook man: "... best of all is, he died an experienced Christian.... One native Indian, at least, of Oregon, is saved, as the fruit of missionary labor."25 24


 
Figure 5
    Chloe Clark Wilson, a layperson who believed that Indians who converted to Christianity would experience life after death

    OHS neg., OrHi 13168
 


 
      The use of "happy death" rhetoric in Oregon can be explained by historical context: the millennial movement of which the Methodist mission was a part and the epidemics decimating the Native population. Rev. David Leslie of the 1840 reinforcement wrote a history of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which demonstrated his understanding of the Great Awakening and the Holiness Movement. He credited sect founder John Wesley with countering the demise of "True Evangelism" in the 1760s. The Methodists took up the "standard" against "the Enemy" and under God's "divine tuition [became] the chosen instruments by whom he would turn away ungodlyness from Jacob resusitate the Church and evangelize the World." Between the 1820s and 1840s, their global crusade against "Satan's Empire" was reinvigorated. The movement compelled the missionaries to seek conversion when possible and, as layperson Almira David Raymond expressed it, "If souls are not converted [then, at least] souls are strengthened and blessed.... my only object is to glorify God and win souls." Although Leslie was dubious of the new prophet movements catching fire in the United States, he agreed that the millennium was imminent: "... all agree that it is our duty to send the gospel & the Bible to as many heathen as we can Now." As Mrs. Raymond expressed it, the Indians "are dying off very fast and all we do for them must be done shortly."26 Margaret Smith, the girls' teacher at the Willamette Mission's Indian school in 1838, related a sermon:
Mican tum-tum Cloosh? (Your heart good?) Mican tum-tum wake cloosh. (Your heart no good.) Alaka mican ma-ma lose. (Bye-and-bye you die.) Mican tum-tum cloosh mican clatamay Sakalatie. (Your heart good you go to God.).... Sakalatie mamoke hiyas cloosh mican tum-tum. (God make very good your heart.) Hiyack wah-wah Sakalatie. (Quick speak to God.)27
 Smith's sermon suggests the limitations of conveying Christianity's core beliefs regarding death and the afterlife in Chinook jargon. Her insistence on haste, hyack, reflects the colonial climate of disease, depopulation, and dispossession in which the Indians lived and the mission family worked and which affected Native comprehension of Christianity.28		 25


 
Figure 6
    Rev. David Leslie, who believed it was his duty to bring Indians salvation through the Bible

    OHS neg., OrHi 4584
 


 
      Convert "William Brooks," incorporated the "happy death" mentality into his understanding of Christianity. While fundraising in Baltimore with Jason Lee in 1839, "Brooks" pondered the condition of a blind African American man and expressed an affinity with him. Apparently, his fellow Baltimore Methodists had referred to the man as "miserable." "Brooks" took exception:
But great many men saucy to me, and I go on. My heart says, I not come here to see that kind [of] men.... These don't care what say God in Bible. If they die, that old man go in heaven; and these rich men — where they go to? You see children, how much more better if he die and go in heaven. I shall never forgit him again.29
 The speech is mediated through Chinook jargon, Lee's translation, and the whimsy of the Christian Advocate's correspondent, who was responsible for the "pidginy" nature of Brooks's voice. Still, "Brooks" clearly recognized racial and economic stratification among Americans and rebuked them, associating himself with the blind man. His affinity with the man was based on infirmity and condemnation. "Brooks" connected with Christianity through physical suffering and death, which was not surprising given the nature of the religion and the realities of his disease-ravaged homeland. Never really knowing a time without pathogenic horror, the young man internalized the rhetoric of the "happy death" to which his mentors condemned his "doomed race."

 26
THE METHODISTS WITNESSED their lofty experiment collapse after scarcely a decade. They founded a mission based on suppositions, faith, and millennial aims, only to have the realities of disease, Native resistance, and colonization undermine them. In the 1830s, Lee and his fellow missionaries dreamed of converting the world, with the Oregon Country as their particular garden to cultivate Christian souls. While doubts had existed for years, the missionaries fought to overcome them. Daniel Lee rhetorically asked David Leslie: "Are the poor Indians more dark and ignorant than I can conceive?" Leslie answered that he could not allow himself to think that way, "for this would destroy my own faith, and ... hinder my efforts for their Salvation." By the early 1840s, however, critics of the mission cited the diminishing Native population as a reason to close it. Remaining loyal to the mission, Lee sought to save "a remnant, as trophies ... to serve" God, though he conceded, as a "race," that Indians were destined to extinction.30 27
      As scholars have long noted, the active promotion of Euro-American colonization may have been more sacred to some Protestant American missionaries than converting the supposedly ill-fated Indians to Christianity. Not surprisingly, when colonization was considered, the pessimistic notion of wholesale racial displacement became evident as well. While Jason Lee came to favor the idea that Indians were naturally disappearing and making way for Euro-Americans, other missionaries suggested more forceful means. In his scouting tour of the Far West in 1835-1836, Rev. Samuel Parker of the ABCFM used the old colonial argument that the indigenous "claim [to their lands] is laboriously, extensively, and practically denied ... and that nations who inhabit fertile countries and disdain or refuse to cultivate them, deserve to be extirpated.'" Did Parker mean exterminated? He did not mean removal, because he also stated that "there being no further west to which [the Oregon Indians] can be removed, the Indian race must expire...."31 He clearly thought Indian extinction inevitable and removal impractical. Daniel Lee and John Frost felt similarly about these "most degraded human beings ... [who] are rapidly wasting away, and the time is not far distant when the last deathwail will proclaim their universal extermination."32 Still, Parker, Jason Lee, and other Protestant missionaries who flocked to Oregon between 1834 and 1840 made exception for the survival of individual, acculturated Indians. The future, however, lay with the American colony and the ascending white race. 28
      An emerging body of thought encouraged this pessimistic assessment — racialism. Race drew more heavily on beliefs about nature, though it, too, could have aspects of divinity when used to explain Native depopulation or to excuse man-made inequalities as sanctioned by God's will. Recently, historians have been mining the depths of racial ideology to understand how and why it displaced earlier explanations of human difference, particularly within the context of colonization. In the North American backcountry, for example, frontier British and then American homesteaders racialized Native peoples as irredeemable "savages," deserving death and removal, only when they competed for the same land and resources. In other instances, such as when Indians allied with Anglos against the French, colonials often deemed Indians noble and brave. So-called Indian hating was a historical phenomenon that arose from the practical challenges of colonization and became particularly acute when colonials saw Indians only as obstacles.33 29
      Racial ideology grew from ground-level colonial decisions about political economy, not from an imposition by high-level officials, philosophers, and scientists. Racialism was a grass-roots movement in which colonial thoughts and actions came to shape policy and the accepted wisdom of society, or "common sense." There was never a neat trajectory, because racialism was so contingent on particular circumstances. Euro-Americans employed race to fit a myriad of situations, and competition among themselves further complicated the picture. People contested, defined, and redefined racial definitions and fought equally hard to give them practical meaning. Euro-Americans used race to legitimize actions that, if perpetrated against other "whites," would have been unacceptable. Race functioned to rationalize thoughts and behavior; it was ideology in its most terrible form. Christian missionaries were not above the fray because they had to make their way through a world that included painful realities, such as epidemic diseases, slavery, and Native dispossession, as well as the contradictory explanations for these phenomena. Famously, slavery caused the Methodists to split into two sectional episcopacies, north and south.34 We should not expect the complications and challenges posed by colonization on the Oregon Mission to have been any less divisive among missionaries in the field. 30
      Colonization shared an important yet stormy relationship with Christian missions in the history of American expansion. Missionary David Leslie praised the relationship between Methodist missions and American colonialism. Methodism, he wrote, fairly "started out with the Republic, it has kept pace with it, establishing the ordinances of Religion coextensively with ... the laws of the government, it has thus met the emergent moral necessities of the opening continent."35 Leslie recognized that colonization and missionization were linked, yet the two endeavors often clashed. Colonization left no room for the Indians who missionaries committed themselves to saving. Generally, the opinions of missionaries were a curious mix of fatalism and optimism: the Native majority, supposedly degraded and disappearing, was a lost cause, but individuals could be saved in soul and perhaps in body. The missionaries were obviously not ghouls, but they could not escape the conventional wisdom of their culture, a "common sense" derived from two centuries of Native death and dispossession. 31
      The Methodists had to have a certain objectivity regarding the death of Native people; in fact, the Willamette Mission maintained what might be termed a "grim ledger" between 1834 and 1839. Like all Methodist missionaries, Jason Lee had to report his activities to the Mission Board regularly and account for expenditures. His ledger of Native mission family members (probably kept by Cyrus Shepard) contained a balance sheet of expenses (clothing, board, funeral services, and coffins) and revenue-producing activities (farming, laboring, hunting, and gathering). For those who died or left, it noted a net loss or gain, a rude cost-benefit analysis for the Mission Board. For example, Chilapoos ("Charles Morehead"), a Kalapuya boy, admitted to the mission on November 29, 1834, cost the mission $23.43 for clothing, board, and tuition, but his nearly six months of labor earned him a credit of $15; he left behind one shirt and one woolen cap when he ran away on April 19, 1835, rendering his balance a net loss to the mission of $8.10. For others such as Kenoteshia, a Chehalis boy, it noted a total loss. Kenoteshia died of "pulmonary consumption" (tuberculosis) on August 19, 1835, after getting sick within weeks of entering the mission on April 26, 1835. He cost $19 for board, medicine, and a coffin plus $7 to send a messenger to his people: total expense of $25 with no offsetting labor credits. The Cayuse man, Wailaptulikt ("John Linsey"), earned substantial credit for his labors and contributions between the summer of 1836 and his departure with his family the following spring. His credits came from hunting — beaver, otter, two bales of dried salmon, one elk, twenty-one deer, seventy ducks, fourteen geese, two cranes, and two partridges — as well as the payments of dressed elk skins for $23.50 and two horses for $26. His credits totaled $78.08. Still, Wailaptulikt's account was charged for items such as ammunition, fish hooks, and knives, as well as $220.56 for the family's clothing, their "sickness, tuition, & funeral ex for children." When Wailaptulikt left with his surviving children, his mission account was "142.48 due." In the cold accounting of the "grim ledger," death took a heavy toll on mission finances.36 32


 
Figure 7
    Page from "Methodist Mission Record Book, 1834-1838," showing costs associated with Indian boarders

    OHS neg., ba013985
 


 
      Ultimately, the Methodists' experiment in Oregon fell to the politics of mission and colony with racial ideology playing a predictable role. Immigrants, missionaries (Catholics and Methodists), and John McLoughlin of the Hudson's Bay Company bickered over land claims, national sovereignty, and a provisional government. Colonials simply assumed that the Indians would be cleared away by government treaties and began staking land claims that sometimes used Native dwellings as markers.37 In response to the political mess created by the squabbling over surviving Indians' homelands, Rev. George Gary was sent in 1844 to investigate the Oregon Mission and terminate it if necessary. Jason Lee went east to argue for the mission's survival, but he died before he could undo Gary's efforts. 33
      Gary divested the Methodist Episcopal Church of most of its holdings in Oregon and largely ended the mission to the Indians, who he deemed a lost cause. By 1843, the Willamette Mission cost $6,334 a year, and the new school was the most expensive operation; the building alone cost $10,000 to construct. The cost of room and board for the Indian children was over $3,400, and it was to the Native students that Gary directed much of his criticism. With a touch of sarcasm and the evangelical rhetoric of "happy deaths," he noted that "nearly all the good" done for the "scholars" was that some "had experienced religion here and died when in school and hopefully had gone to heaven." In the previous winter, four children had died among the twenty-five to thirty students who lived there semi-regularly.38 34
      Gary's assessments are in stark contrast to Hamilton Campbell's, who ran the Indian school during its last years and could be out of a job if Gary followed Hines's advice. Campbell claimed that "the children of the school are, and have been doing better than they have done at any other time, in Religion." All but one of the children, "Frank," had converted. The Methodists had differing opinions regarding what it meant to be converted, however, and Campbell's view was not necessarily shared. He had earlier claimed a thousand converts in 1840, a vastly exaggerated figure that no other Methodist would corroborate for western Oregon. Reverend Waller, for example, had only reported that some children had "recently professed religion and gave good evidence of a change of heart." Still, Jason Lee's dream of Native Elijahs going forth to convert their people was approaching some degree of realization. According to Campbell, "Joseph and Thomas have become quite exhorters — both of them are ecceedingly anxious to qualify themselves to go out and preache to the Indians." Campbell praised Piupiumaksmaks's son who was supposedly fulfilling the missionaries' dream: "... Elijah is now trying to teach his [Wallawalla] people the principals of Religion as well as can. He Reads the Bible to them twice a day and explains it to them. A greate many comes to him from a distance to hear him explain the scriptures." Campbell hoped that he was only the first, as "everything bids fair for many other to go out as heralds of the cross."39 Not surprisingly, Campbell bitterly opposed Gary's plan to close the school. The Indians could both survive and convert. 35
      With Gary, the fixed biological notions of race became increasingly apparent. He attributed the high mortality rate and generally poor health of the children to "venereal scrofula," a lymphatic condition supposedly inherited from "their degraded and [sexually] depraved ancestors."40 Neither he nor any contemporary offered any evidence that the children's chronically swollen lymph glands resulted from venereal disease. The scourge of syphilis had assailed the colonial and indigenous populations since the introduction of the Pacific fur trade, but the descriptions do not indicate it here. Like the dreaded "fever and ague," scrofula was vague, antebellum medical terminology that referred to any number of medical problems that displayed swelling of the neck, particularly among children. It could result from numerous factors associated with poor standards of living or crowded conditions; various contagious infections spread easily in the dormitory. But Jason Lee denied seeing any scrofula or venereal disease among the "several hundred" Kalapuyas of the upper Willamette Valley and Umpquas above and below Gagnier's fort. Among the Indians of the lower Willamette and Columbia Rivers, scrofula prevailed "to a great extent....[but] it is very far from the truth that scarcely an exception is found."41 Lee seemed to take great exception to the conclusion that the children had inherited a venereal disease, as Gary, Frost, and Hines believed. Each of these missionaries, he explained, wanted to leave Oregon as soon as possible and readily cited the supposedly hopeless condition of Indian health to buttress their appeals for reassignment to Euro-American conferences in the Northeast.42 36
      There was a more likely cause of this common condition among the children. Throughout the long, wet, chilly western Oregon winters, they spent a large amount of time being "educated" in manual labor at the agricultural school. The Willamette Valley's rainy season can stretch from September through June; and when combined with persistent illnesses and outdoor labor, it can be deadly.43 Regardless of other possible explanations, Gary and other critics faulted the Indians' supposed biologically inherited depravity; the mission could not change the physical nature of the children.

 37
IT IS NO SURPRISE that Jacksonian Americans employed pseudo-scientific racial beliefs in the 1840s. During the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, popular beliefs about human differences fueled an incipient scientific racism, which gave apparent support to the folk beliefs that generated it. It was a cycle of mutually reinforcing suppositions based on "common sense" and the need to rationalize Western behavior, such as the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples, imperialism, and slavery. In 1799, Englishman Charles White combined Christian doctrine with folk beliefs to begin a new era of pseudo-scientific beliefs about human differences. White argued that just as God ordered nature with humans above all living things in the Great Chain of Being, He also created a hierarchy among humans. In a pattern that would be a hallmark of scientific racism, White cast popular perceptions about man-made inequalities as both natural and divine. Europeans, masters of the imperial food chain, were closest to God. In White's hierarchy and subsequent versions by other "scientists," American Indians were not the lowest ranking; that was reserved for sub-Saharan Africans, thus conveniently rationalizing their enslavement. Nevertheless, Indians occupied a low position, which was evidenced by their supposed lack of civilization and, notably, their diminishing numbers.44 38
      Racial folk beliefs purporting to explain human inequalities were endemic by the 1840s, though the "science" was only then emerging to support the common wisdom. Not all Methodist missionaries would have agreed with Rev. John Frost's use of the fledgling pseudo-science of craniometry. Frost explained that the Tillamook's supposed greed was evident in the shape of their skulls, their "bump of avariciousness being very prominent...."45 He incorporated the older idea of ethnic difference by blaming the Tillamook's supposed pecuniary bump on their custom of head-flattening; culture, behavior, and physicality were linked. Frost would have found many like-minded people in the nation. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, for example, issued his "Destiny of the Race" speech only four years later, drawing on the common wisdom of Indian extinction: "the White race will take the ascendant [position].... The Red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast" because they refused to assimilate. Benton believed that history on the Pacific Coast would necessarily be similar: divinely blessed, the "superior race" was the new vanguard of the world.46

 39
IN CLOSING THE OREGON MISSION, Gary cited the actual numbers of Indians within the mission's claimed boundaries of modern western Oregon and Washington.47 The Indian population in the lower country had been a point of concern since the Protestants' arrival. John Richmond, a missionary of the 1840 reinforcement and an avid critic of Jason Lee, wrote to the Mission Board in 1841: "I have been most disappointed ... in the number of Indians.... Instead of thousands I have found but a few hundreds belonging to this region [the Nisqually station on Puget Sound] and these are fast sinking to the grave." William Kone, also a disillusioned 1840 recruit and vocal Lee critic, wrote from the Clatsop station a few weeks later: "there are too many [missionaries] ... [while] the Indians are few in number, and not prepared to receive the Gospel."48 40
      Although numbers continued to be an issue for missionaries such as Hines and Frost, who were critical of the Oregon Mission," migratory habits," "degraded" behavior, "savage" customs, and language were also commonly cited. Frost, for example, complained about the number of Indians on the lower Columbia; there were too few people per dialect to make gaining sufficient proficiency worthwhile, he said. Also, missionaries complained about getting enough Indians together at any one place because of their seasonally peripatetic way of life.49 41
      By 1844, the waves of disease among Indians of the lower country tempered Jason Lee's hopes for their future, but he still saw interracial "amalgamation," or mixed-bloods, as an avenue of salvation. Testifying before the Mission Board, he explained that "the Indians on the Walamette, will become, as a distinct race, extinct," but intermarriages performed by missionaries would keep "more Indian blood ... running in the veins of white men a hundred years hence than would have been running in the veins of the Indians...."50 But amalgamation ran into problems. "Mary Sargeant," a Molala woman who lived for a time at the Willamette Mission, repeatedly left her husband, Euro-American immigrant Felix Hathaway, during their two-year marriage. Hathaway petitioned the Oregon Provisional Government for divorce in 1845, reportedly after learning that "Mary was constrained to give her consent ... to marriage through fear of those persons having controll of her at that time." An independent missionary from Connecticut, Congregationalist John Griffin, refused to recognize the sanctity of interracial marriages and accused the Methodists of "taking sides in favor of adultery." At Fort Vancouver, Anglican missionary Rev. Herbert Beaver reacted similarly, condemning "the state of concubinage" and "fornication" because the Native wives were not properly instructed in and converted to the "truth" and so could not be considered legally married. As historian Robert Loewenberg put it, "Methodists, seeking in their dilemmas to erect bridges from what were essentially barriers, were open to such criticism."51 42
      Early immigrant John Minto recalled the change during the mid-1840s with the influx of Euro-American settlers: "some of them who had Indian families were rather exiled in civilized society afterwards. Some of them found it more agreeable to go ... to their wives' people."52 Lee's experiment of amalgamation fell to more widely accepted contemporary folk beliefs about racial exclusion. Rev. Josiah Parrish, one of the only members of the 1840 reinforcement to continue to support the Oregon Mission, also noted the role of racial exclusion. Regarding the Indian school, he explained that the newly arrived Euro-Americans decided "to have our children educated separate and apart rather from the Indians...." Gary closed the Indian school in 1844 because "it was not productive [of] very much good." As Parrish suggested, the Oregon Institute, which replaced the Indian school, was only nominally racially inclusive; Article iii of its constitution included non-whites but allowed the committee to exclude Indians in practice. The Mission Society concluded that "this institution is destined to wield a powerful influence in molding the mind and heart of the medley mass with which the Valley of the Columbia is so rapidly filling up." Noting the role of racism, Parrish explained to historian Hubert Bancroft: "You know many of our people do not think there is a good Indian without he is dead. After the arrival of the [Reverend Gary] in 1844 ... the mission work was principally to the whites." He pointedly claimed that he had maintained an ever-increasing number of Indian converts at the Clatsop mission. Still, an increasing number of converts does not mean an increasing or even stable population of Indians, even if, as is likely, missionaries such as Hines and Frost understated Native demographics to further their cause to go home.53 43


 
Figure 8
    Rev. Josiah Parrish, who supported continuing the mission in the Willamette Valley

    OHS neg., OrHi 5239
 


 
      Granting that diseases annihilated thousands of Indian people, how many Indians had to be alive to be worth "saving"? The reason for closing the mission and changing the school to serve Euro-American children was not simple. In fact, as late as 1843, the Methodist missionaries resolved "that we are yet Deeply impressed with the importance of our missionary operations in this country, and that this mission presents Strong claims on us and the church for our prayers confidence and support." They even considered increasing the number of mission stations.54 44
      Despite "destiny" and propaganda, the Indians had not disappeared. In recognition of this fact and uncharacteristic of his peers, Parrish returned to Methodist tradition in 1845 and became an itinerant preacher "to the indians and to the whites." He reported: "The Indians were moving aboutt hither and yon, as they always had done," though he granted that "there were more than 500 Indians that died in this valley, with chills and fever and typhoid fever."55 Similarly, Hamilton Campbell claimed in 1843 that "more children are brought to the school than we can take care of. I could get 200 children during this winter if I had the means to take care of them." Like Parrish, he declared, "I have not yet Forsaken the poor Calapooa Indians nor do I ever intend to...." He countered the prevailing idea that the Indians were vanishing, decrying that Hines was leaving despite the significant amount of mission work to do among "the poor calapooa Indians all around him, and not a few in number, as I have been about one hundred miles South of this, and know for myself that there is doubtless over a thousand of these Redskin brethren...." Again, like Parrish, Campbell blamed Hines, who "is all most crazy to get home."56

 45
SINCE THE 1820s, Protestant missionaries struggled with dueling perceptions of Native people as inferior savages doomed to extinction or as heathens who could be saved. Racial definitions were biologically and divinely fixed, leaving no room for human agency to alter them; thus, evangelizing among Indians was of dubious value. Ethnic definitions, the older and receding set of meanings used to explain human difference, were more fluid, assumed monogenesis and universality, and allowed for change. The Oregon Mission had been founded on the ethnic construction, a belief in temporal, culturally derived, and convertible human differences. From the outset, the Missionary Herald expressed this notion in its original 1821 appeal for a mission in the Pacific Northwest: "God has made of one blood all nations, and provided a Savior for all, and designed his Gospel for every heathen nation, however barbarous or inaccessible...."57 46
      Jason Lee's mission began with like-minded determination, but the ethnic discourse faded with each new epidemic and the changing politics and economics of the colony. As late as 1845, the American Indian Mission Association described for Congress the "lamentable decline" of Native peoples in explicitly non-racialized terms; rather than "any constitutional defect peculiar to the race," the causes of depopulation "emanated from their conquerors."58 The Mission Association advocated removing Indians from the corrupting influences of the "settlements," international disputes, and the fur trade. Oregon Indians could still be saved. The memorial was issued from Louisville, Kentucky, however, far removed from the local realities of western Oregon, and they came to nothing. 47
      The racial discourse of the "doomed race" became dominant in Oregon in 1844, when Gary replaced Lee and the immigrants challenged the ownership of mission property. Racial ideology made the actual Indian population irrelevant and allowed colonists to focus instead on competition for property, eliminating Native sovereignty from the equation. Racializing Indians denied their rights to the land; indeed, it denied their continued existence. The missionaries were confronting the reality of Oregon colonization; settlers were advancing westward and making claims of occupancy. Time was running out for the Methodist mission-colony experiment. Euro-American emigrants brought the folk belief of race — the determinant of who can possess the land and who has a right to exist if that "right" is challenged — to the Oregon Country, forcing the missionaries to play the land-title game and abandon their evangelical efforts. Racial thinking did not determine the fate of the mission, but it did inform the decisions of missionaries who negotiated the maze of their own perceptions regarding the Indians, competition from Catholics, and the growing immigrant population's challenges to their property. Native deaths and depopulation became racialized and politicized, and they served as a principal rationale for abandoning the mission. 48
      Racial ideologies would serve to legitimize the continued dispossession and marginalization of the Native Oregon population throughout the nineteenth century. Race, as ideology, did not have to make complete sense (though so-called race scientists tried for over a century) or to require total adherence from the dominant Euro-American population. There was always a Josiah Parrish to question "common sense," and reformers in the late 1800s reinvigorated the cause of assimilating Indians into Christian America only to see again their efforts fall to racial pessimism in the early 1900s.59 In Jacksonian America, the "Gustavus Hineses" outnumbered the "Josiah Parrishes," and racialists would only increase their majority in the United States, limiting competing discourses and actions. 49
      In time, with the conquest of the Native West, the colonial creed of "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" gave way, as Euro-American domination made it irrelevant. Euro-American society would create new versions of race to fit subsequent needs, however, including dismantling reservations; systematically condemning Native traditions, cultures, and spiritualities; and subjecting Indians to a dominating, paternalistic federal control that would have been unacceptable for any other segment of society. Racial ideology proved remarkably resilient and, as ever, functioned to excuse inexcusable actions. The Methodist missionaries could have been powerful allies of Oregon Indians as they sought to recover demographically, economically, and politically. As was too often the case, however, the surviving Native people confronted the challenges of colonization largely on their own. 50


Notes

Research for this article was supported by the Oregon Historical Society's Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Memorial Senior Research Fellowship.

1. Jason Lee in Robert J. Loewenberg, "New Evidence, Old Categories: Jason Lee as Zealot," Pacific Historical Review 47:3 (August 1978): 363.

2. Robert Moulton Gatke, "A Document of Mission History, 1833-43," Oregon Historical Quarterly 36:1 (March 1935): 258.

3. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 191.

4. Modern understanding involves a complicated mixture of factors, including long-term isolation of populations following ancient migrations, immunological inheritance, microbial genetic mutation, domesticated animals, attempted treatments, and population density. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly 33:2. (1976), 289-99; Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

5. Gray H. Whaley, "Creating Oregon from Illahee: Race, Settler-Colonialism, and Native Sovereignty in Western Oregon, 1792-1856" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2002), 193-194. In some cases, Congress also contributed through its Civilization Fund, but the diplomatic complexities of Oregon's joint-occupation between the United States and Great Britain prevented any official federal aid to the Oregon Mission.

6. "Diary of Rev. Jason Lee," Oregon Historical Quarterly 17:3 (September 1916): 242.

7. Ibid., 255-6; "Mission Record Book," MS 1224, folder 1, 128-9, and folder 5, 175, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society, Portland [hereafter OHS Research Library].

8. Ibid., folder 1, 11; "Diary of Rev. Jason Lee," 255.

9. Cushing Eells Letters, 1843-1859, MS 1218, folder 2, 50-51, OHS Research Library; Henry Perkins to David Leslie, February 8, 1844, in David Leslie, MS 1216, folder 5, OHS Research Library.

10. Gustavus Hines Diary, September 6, 1845, MS 1215, see entries 10/2/45, 12/10/45, 1/11/46, 2/21/46, OHS Research Library; Gustavus Hines, Life on the Plains of the Pacific (Buffalo: George H. Derby, 1851), 10; Nellie B. Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost, 1840-1843," Oregon Historical Quarterly 35:4 (December 1934): 360; Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost, 1840-1843," Oregon Historical Quarterly 35:1 (March 1934): 72-73; Kone in Gatke, "A Document of Mission History," 87. For Lee, see Frances Fuller Victor, The Early Indian Wars of Oregon, Compiled from the Oregon Archives and Other Original Sources with Muster Rolls (Salem, Ore.: Frank C. Baker, State Printer, 1894), 14.

11. See Yvonne P. Hajda, "Regional Social Organization in the Greater Lower Columbia, 1792-1830" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1984), 2, 22, 24.

12. Theodore Stern, Chiefs and Change in the Oregon Country: Indian Relations at Fort Nez Percés, 1818-1855, vol. 2 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1996), 19; Antonio R. Gualtieri, Christianity and Native Traditions: Indigenization and Syncretism among the Inuit and Dene of the Western Arctic (Notre Dame, Ind: Cross Cultural Publications, Cross Roads Books, 1984), 3-9. See Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes, eds., Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), esp. "Introduction," 3-7.


 
Figure 9
 


13. "Mission Record Book."

14. H.W. Perkins to Waller, January 1, 1841, MS 1210, folder 9, OHS Research Library; H.K. Perkins to Cyrus Shepard, December 6, 1839, MS 1219, folder 2b, OHS Research Library; Diary of Alvan F. Waller, MS 1210, folder 11, 4, OHS Research Library.

15. Gualtieri, Christianity and Native Traditions, 3-4; Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1862 (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 69; Tracy Neal Leavelle, "'We Will Make It Our Own Place': Agriculture and Adaptation at the Grande Ronde Reservation, 1856-1887," American Indian Quarterly 22:4 (1998): 433-456; Pamela T. Amoss, "The Indian Shaker Church," in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 7 (Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 633-9. Regarding syncretism, see Leslie Spier, The Prophet Dance of the Northwest and Its Derivatives: The Source of the Ghost Dance (New York: AMS Press, 1979); James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896); Cora Alice DuBois, The Feather Cult of the Middle Columbia (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta Publishing Co., 1938).

16. "Mission Record Book," 128-129. Deaths include "William Brooks," who died on Jason Lee's first fundraising trip east.

17. George B. Roberts, "Recollections of George B. Roberts," MS P-A 83, 16, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

18. Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 84, 109, tables, 323-9; P. L. Edwards, Sketch of the Oregon Territory or Emigrants' Guide (Liberty, Mo.: The Herald Office, 1842), 15-16; Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit, 329. Rev. John Frost was responsible for the lower estimate, and his reasons for undercounting the Native population related to his desire to leave his mission post. See Ibid., 109; Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost, 1840-1843," Oregon Historical Quarterly 35:2 (June 1934): 140-1; Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980); and Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics."

19. Verne Frederick Ray, "Lower Chinook Ethnographic Notes," University of Washington Publications in Anthropology 7:2 (1938): 86.

20. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs [hereafter ARCIA] 1857, 361, 369; ARCIA 1859, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., S.Ex. Doc., Serial 1023, 793; ARCIA 1871, 42nd Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Ex. Doc., Serial 1505, 323; Dorothy and Jack Sutton, eds., Indian Wars of the Rogue River (Grants Pass, Ore.: Josephine County Historical Society, 1969), 261.

21. Roberts, "Recollections," 14; Boyd, Coming of the Spirit, 46-7; Ross Cox, The Columbia River, ed. Edgar I. Stewart and Jane R. Stewart (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957), 170. Irving's narrative was originally published five years after Cox's in 1836. Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1836); Roberts, "Recollections," 14; Robert Boyd, People of The Dalles, The Indians of Wascopam Mission: A Historical Ethnography Based on the Papers of the Methodist Missionaries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 173; Boyd, Coming of the Spirit, 46, 109, 112-15; Hines, Life on the Plains of the Pacific, 105-112.


 
Figure 10
 


22. "Mission Record Book," folder 1, 29-30.

23. Stern, Chiefs and Change, 44-46, 170-2; Robert Boyd, "The Pacific Northwest Measles Epidemic of 1847-1848," Oregon Historical Quarterly 95:1 (Spring 1994): 6-47; Albert L Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 80. As well, his son and the Methodists' great hope, "Elijah" had been killed in a confrontation at Sutter's Fort. Although Piupiumaksmaks played an intermediary role in the, so-called Cayuse War, his position changed over the following decade. Both Piupiumaksmaks and Wailaptulikt became important figures in anti-colonial campaigns against Americans in the 1850s. Wailaptulikt emerged as a war leader among the Tygh band of Deschutes River Sahaptins, and Piupiumaksmaks led hundreds of Plateau Sahaptian warriors in 1855 and 1856.

24. Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost," 363; Jason Lee in Christian Advocate & Journal, September 2, 1836, 3; Waller, folder 11, 5-6.

25. Daniel Lee and J.H Frost, Ten Years in Oregon (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1968), 263-4; Waller, folder 11, 6-7; Hamilton Campbell to "Bro. & Sister Whitcomb," October 25, 1843, MS 1225, folder 2, 4, OHS Research Library; Chloe A. Clark to Mary A. Norton, May 22, 1840, MS 1225, folder 12, 4, OHS Research Library; North American, June 5, 1839, reprinted in Cornelius J. Brosnan, Jason Lee: Prophet of a New Oregon (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930), n70, 39-40.

26. David Leslie, MS 1216, folder 3, 2, OHS Research Library; "Westward to Oregon: Diary and Letters of Almira David Raymond, and W.W. Raymond, Oregon pioneers with Rev. Jason Lee," MS 2997, 16, 31, 34, OHS Research Library; David Leslie to T.C. Peirce, April 21, 1842, MS 1216, folder 5, OHS Research Library.

27. Margaret Smith, April 10, 1838" in Oregonian and Indians' Advocate, November, 1838, vol. 1, 58-61 reprinted in Brosnan, Jason Lee, 82.

28. Thomas Edward Harper, Chinook: A History and Dictionary of the Northwest Coast Trade Jargon (Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan Press, 1935), 75.

29. "William Brooks' Boston Speech," Zion's Herald, February 13, 1839, 27 in Brosnan, Jason Lee, 112.

30. Daniel Lee to David Leslie, January 20, 180, MS 1216, folder 5, OHS Research Library; Jason Lee in Loewenberg, "New Evidence, Old Categories," 363.

31. Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains, Under the Direction of the A.B.C.F.M, 4th ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Andrus, Woodruff, and Gauntlett, 1844), 269, 271.

32. Lee and Frost, Ten Years in Oregon, 105.

33. Slaiha Belmessous, "Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century French Colonial Policy," American Historical Review 110:3 (June 2005): 322-49. For an insightful discussion of "Indian hating," see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 383-96. On race, see White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 320-22; Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1999); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975).

34. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1997).

35. Leslie, 10-11.

36. "Mission Record Book," folder 5, 141, 147, 175, OHS Research Library.

37. Whaley, "Creating Oregon from Illahee," 260; Whaley, "Oregon, Illahee, and the Empire Republic: A Case Study of American Colonialism, 1843-1858," Western Historical Quarterly 36:2 (Summer 2005): 157-78.

38. Charles Henry Carey, "Diary of Rev. George Gary," Oregon Historical Quarterly 24:1 (March 1923): 83-86; "Minutes of the Annual Meetings of the Oregon Mission, For the Years 1841, 1842, 1843," MS 1224, folder 3, 37, OHS Research Library. See also K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

39. Hamilton Campbell to Ezekial Pilcher, Sept 12, 1840, MS 1225, folder 4, OHS Research Library; "Minutes of the Annual Meetings," MS 1224, folder 3, 37, OHS Research Library ; Hamilton Campbell to "Bro. & Sister Whitcomb," October 25, 1843.

40. Carey, "Diary of Rev. George Gary," 84.

41. Lee testimony to the Board, July 2, 1844, in Brosnan, Jason Lee: Prophet, 257.

42. A.F. Waller to Amos Cooke, August 2, 1843, MS 1210, folder 7, OHS Research Library; Carey, "Diary of Rev. George Gary," 91.

43. Susan Shepard to Mrs. Joseph A Lloyd, November 1, 1837, MS 1219, folder 2b, OHS Research Library; Jason Lee in Christian Advocate & Journal, September 2, 1836.

44. Smedley, Race in North America, 163, 166, 174-6, 229-40; Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 11-12, 91;. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 189-207.

45. Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost," Oregon Historical Quarterly 35:3 (September 1934): 239. For a discussion of craniometry and its chief creator Dr. Samuel Morton, see Smedley, Race in North America, 230-3.


 
Figure 11
    A sketch of Jason Lee's Oregon home

    OHS neg., OrHi 39916
 


46. Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., May 28, 1846.

47. For border claims, see Charles Henry Carey, "Methodist Annual Reports Relating to the Willamette Mission (1834-1848)," Oregon Historical Quarterly 23:4 (December 1923): 325.

48. Gatke, "A Document of Mission History," 82.

49. Pipes, "Journal of John H. Frost," 360; Lee testimony, July 2, 1844, in Brosnan, Jason Lee, 257. See also, for example, Gatke, "A Document of Mission History," 88.

50. Brosnan, Jason Lee, 258.

51. "Petition of Felix Hathaway to Legislative Committee [Oregon Provisional Government], June 28, 1845," in Robert J. Loewenberg, Equality on the Oregon Frontier: Jason Lee and the Methodist Mission, 1834-43 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 134, 135; Thomas E. Fessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 1836-1838: Chaplain to the Hudson's Bay Company and Missionary to the Indians at Fort Vancouver (Portland, Ore.: Champoeg Press, 1959), 48-54, 57, 86, 116.

52. John Minto, "Early Days of Oregon," MS P-A 50, 9, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

53. Josiah L. Parrish, "Anecdotes of Intercourse with the Indians," Ms. P-A 59, 16, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Carey, "Methodist Annual Reports," 357, 359; Parrish, "Anecdotes of Intercourse," Ms. P-A, 37, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

54. "Minutes of the Annual Meetings," MS. 1224, folder 3, 41, OHS Research Library.

55. Parrish, "Anecdotes of Intercourse," Ms. P-A, 19, 34-47, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

56. Hamilton Campbell to "Bro. & Sister Whitcomb," October 25, 1843, 2-3.

57. Green, Journal of a Tour, 10.

58. House, "Memorial of The Board of Managers of the American Indian Mission Association," 29th Cong., 1st Sess., January 13, 1846, Doc. 73, Serial 483, 1.

59. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indian, 1880-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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