Independent missionaries arrive.—Their troubles.—Conversion of Indiana at the Dalles.—Their motives.—Emigrants of 1839.—Blubber-Mouth Smith.—Re-enforcement of the Methodist Mission in 1840.—Father De Smet.—Rev. Harvey Clark and associates.—Ewing Young.—Names of missionaries and settlers.

In the fall of 1839, the Rev. J. S. Griffin and wife arrived at Dr. Whitman’s station. Mr. Griffin had undertaken an independent mission, in company with a Mr. Munger and wife. They had received an outfit from some warm-hearted Christians of the Litchfield North Association, of Connecticut. Mr. Griffin reached St. Louis a single man, fell in love and married on sight, I do not know whether it was first or second. At all events, Rev. Mr. Griffin and Mr. Munger and their wives consented to travel together till they reached Fort Hall, at which place Mr. Griffin, being the getter-up of the mission and claiming ecclesiastical jurisdiction, took it upon himself to leave Mr. Munger and his wife at Fort Hall, to take care of themselves as best they could. Frank Ermatinger, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, at once furnished Mr. Munger and his wife the means of transportation, and brought them to Dr. Whitman’s station, where he knew Mr. Munger could find a place for himself and wife. This transaction of Mr. Griffin injured his usefulness as a minister, and left him in the country but little inspected by any who knew of his conduct to a fellow-traveler and an intelligent Christian woman. The fact that Mr. Munger afterward became deranged, or even that he was partially deranged at Fort Hall, or before they reached that place, is no excuse for his treating a man in that condition and his wife as he did. Mr. Griffin claims that Mr. Ermatinger stole three of his horses, or had them hid, when at Fort Hall, to get Mr. Munger and wife to travel with him, and, by so doing, give the impression that he had abandoned them. From a careful review of Mr. Griffin’s lengthy defense in this case, we can not conceive that any further change or correction is required, as the facts stated are by him admitted. From Mr. Griffin’s statement we are satisfied that improper and undue influences were used to break up and defeat his Indian missionary plans and settlement by Mr. Ermatinger and the Hudson’s Bay Company, and also to destroy his clerical influence in the country. Unfortunately, Mr. Griffin gave too much cause for his enemies to do as they did.

In the winter of 1850, Mr. Griffin made an attempt to pass the Salmon River Mountains to Payette River, to establish a mission among the Snake Indians in which he failed and found his way into the Wallamet as a settler, where he still remains.

There were with Mr. Griffin’s party some four men, one by the name of Ben Wright, who hail been a Methodist preacher in the States, but whose religion failed him on his way over the mountains. He reached the Dalles, where he renewed his religion under Rev. Mr. Perkins and D. Lee.

While at the Dalles, the three clergymen succeeded in converting, as they supposed, a large number of the Indians. While this Indian revival was in progress the writer had occasion to visit Vancouver. On his way, he called on the missionaries at the Dalles, and, in speaking of the revival among the Indians, we remarked that, in our opinion, most of the religious professions of the natives were from selfish motives. Mr. Perkins thought not; he named one Indian that, he felt certain, was really converted, if there was a true conversion. In a short time Daniel Lee, his associate, came in, and remarked: “What kind of a proposition do you think —— (naming Mr. Perkins’ truly converted Indian) has made to me?” Perkins replied: “Perhaps he will perform the work we wished him to do.” “No,” says Lee.; “he says he will pray a whole year if I give him a shirt and a capote.” This fact shows that the natives who were supposed to be converted to Christianity were making these professions to gain presents from the missionaries. We have witnessed similar professions among the Nez PercÉ and Cayuse Indians. The giving of a few presents of any description to them induces them to make professions corresponding to the wish of the donor.

With Messrs. Griffin, Munger, and Wright, came Messrs. Lawson, Keiser, and Geiger, late in the fall of 1839; also a man by the name of Farnam, who seemed to be an explorer or tourist. I met him at Vancouver, where he was receiving the hospitality of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and collecting material for a journal, or history of Oregon. It is said of him that, on starting from the States, he succeeded in getting himself appointed captain of a company consisting of some fourteen men. He soon attempted to exercise absolute control of the company, which caused a division. The party voted to suspend his official functions, and finally suspended him and expelled him from the train. On returning to the States he published a book, which, as was to be expected, was favorable to himself and friends (if he had any), and severe on his opposers or enemies. The professed object of the party was to form a settlement in Oregon. In consequence of the course pursued by Farnam, it all broke up. A man called Blubber-Mouth Smith, Blair, a millwright, and Robert Shortess were of the party. These all found their way into Oregon, while the balance of the party went south and wintered in the mountains. Mr. Farnam was furnished a free passage to the Sandwich Islands by the Hudson’s Bay Company, for which his traveling companions and those best acquainted with him have given the company credit, as one good act.

Sydney Smith—called “Blubber-Mouth,” from the fact that he was a great talker and fond of telling big yarns, which he, no doubt, had repeated so often that he believed them to be true, and would appear somewhat offended if his statements were not believed by others—had a tolerably fair education, and appeared to understand the lottery business, as conducted in some of the States. He was a man who had read considerable in his early days, and had he been less boisterous and persistent in statements that appeared improbable to others, would have been far more reliable and useful. As it was, in those early times, his knowledge and free-speaking became quite useful, when combined with the hearty action he gave to the objects in contemplation. He was ambitious and extremely selfish, and, when opposed in his plans, quite unreasonable.

Robert Shortess possessed a combination of qualities such as should have formed one of the best and noblest of men; with a good memory, extensive reading, inflexible purpose, strong hate, affectionate and kind, skeptical and religious, honest and liberal to a fault, above medium height, light-brown hair, blue eyes, and thin and spare features. His whole life is a mystery, his combinations a riddle. He early entered with heart and soul into the situation and condition of the settlements, and stood for their rights in opposition to all the combined influences in the country. As a politician he acts on the principle of right, without any regard to expediency. As a religious man he has no faith; as a skeptic he is severe on all alike. The country owes much to him for his labor and influence in combating slavery and shaping the organic policy of the settlements.

At the close of 1839, there were ten Protestant ministers and two Roman priests, two physicians, six laymen, and thirteen American women in the country—twenty-nine in all—connected with the Protestant missions, or under their immediate control, and twenty settlers, besides about ten men that were under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company, yet having strong American feelings. There were also ten American children, five of them born in the country. Mrs. Whitman gave birth to the first white child, a daughter, born on this coast, who was drowned in the Wallawalla River at about two years of age; Mrs. Spalding the second, a daughter, still living; Mrs. Elkanah Walker the first boy, and Mrs. W. H. Gray, the second. These boys are both making good names for themselves. It is to be hoped that every act and effort of their lives will be alike honorable to their parents, themselves, and their native country. As to the first daughter of Oregon, I regret to say, she disobeyed the wish of her parents and friends, and married a man whose early education was neglected, but who has natural ability and energy to rise above his present position, obtain an education, and become an ornament to his adopted country, and an honor to Oregon’s eldest daughter.

On the first of June of this year, the Lausanne, Captain Spalding, arrived in the Columbia River with a re-enforcement for the Methodist Mission of eight clergymen, five laymen, and one physician, all with wives, five single ladies, and fifteen children, belonging to the different families, with a full supply of goods, such as were needed and appropriate for the settlement, the various missions, and for Indian trade. September following, Rev. Harvey Clark and wife, A. T. Smith and wife, and P. B. Littlejohn and wife, arrived across the Rocky Mountains. With this company came eleven mountain men, eight of them with native wives. We now had twenty-one Protestant ministers, three Roman priests, fifteen lay members of the Protestant Church, thirty-four white women, thirty-five American settlers, and thirty-two white children—one hundred and eight persons immediately under control of the missions. Thirty-six settlers, twenty-five of them with native wives. These thirty-six settlers are counted as outside the missions and Hudson’s Bay Company. There were about fifty Canadian-French under the control of the company.

Thus we can begin to see the development of the three influences or parties. The Hudson’s Bay Company had in their religious element three Romish priests, assisted actively by all the Canadian-French Catholics and such clerks as Pambrun, Guinea, Grant, and McBean, with such interpreters as old Toupin, of whom Mr. Parker, in his journal, says: “The interpreter I had been expecting did not arrive, and consequently much of what I wished to say to these hundreds of Indians could not be communicated for want of a medium.” On the preceding page, Mr. Parker remarks: “But as I have little prospect of the arrival of my interpreter, I shall probably be left to commiserate their anxiety, while it will be out of my power to do them good.”

Old John Toupin, under the sanctity of a Roman Catholic oath, says, at St. Louis, of Wallamet, on September 24, 1848; “I have been seventeen years employed as interpreter at Fort Wallawalla. I was there when Mr. Parker, in 1835, came to select places for Presbyterian missions among the Cayuses and Nez PercÉs, and to ask lands for those missions. He employed me as interpreter in his negotiations with the Indians on that occasion.” Mr. Parker has just said “the interpreter I had been expecting did not arrive.” Toupin says: “Mr. Pambrun, the gentleman then in charge of the fort, accompanied me to the Cayuses and Nez PercÉs. Mr. Parker, in company with Mr. Pambrun, an American, and myself, went first to the Cayuses, upon the lands called Wailatpu, that belonged to three chiefs,—Splitted Lip, or Yomtip; Red Cloak, or Waptachtakamal; and Feather Cap, or Tilokaikt.” Having met them at that place, he told them that he was coming to select a place to build a preaching-house, to teach them how to live, and to teach school to their children, and that he would not come himself to establish the mission, but a doctor, or medicine man, would come in his place; that the doctor would be the chief of the mission, and would come in the following spring. “I came to select a place for a mission,” said he, “but I do not intend to take your lands for nothing. After the doctor is come, there will come every year a big ship loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. These goods will not be sold, but given to you. The mission will bring you plows and hoes to learn you how to cultivate the land, and they will not sell, but give them to you.” From the Cayuses Mr. Parker went to the Nez PercÉs, and there he made the same promises to the Indians as at Wailatpu. “Next spring there will come a missionary to establish himself here and take a piece of land; but he will not take it for nothing, you shall be paid every year; this is the American fashion.” This statement is made by authority of Rev. J. B. A. Brouillet; vicar-general of Wallawalla.

Rev. Mr. Parker, as before remarked, and as his journal shows, soon understood all the maneuverings of this Hudson’s Bay Company. He had no confidence in their friendship or their interpreters. As a matter of policy they could do no less than treat him kindly, or, more properly, civilly, and allow him to leave the country, as he did. But mark the strictness and care of the company to impress the necessity of compliance with their arrangements upon the minds of those that followed Mr. Parker. Keep the massacre to which Vicar-General Brouillet refers before your mind. Life and blood and treasure have been expended. The fair land we inhabit was not secured without a struggle. The early Protestant missions were not defeated and broken up without outside influences. The Indians were not abandoned till they had dipped their hands in the blood of their best and truest friend, and “become seven-fold more the children of the devil than they were in their native state,” by the teachings they had received from malicious and interested parties to make them so.

Father P. J. De Smet, from Brouillet’s statements, was among the Flatheads and at Wallawalla in 1840. This priest boasted of his belonging to the Jesuit order of the Romish Church. He usually wore a black frock-coat, was of full habit, arrogant and bigoted in his opinions, and spoke with considerable sarcasm and contempt of all Americans, and especially of the missionaries, as an ignorant set of men to represent the American churches. He would be considered, in his church, a zealous and faithful priest of the order of Jesus. His religious instructions to the Indians were simple and easy to be understood: “Count your beads, hate or kill the Suapies (Americans), and kiss the cross.”

Rev. Harvey Clark was a man whose religion was practical, whose labors were without ceasing, of slender frame, black hair, deep, mellow voice, kind and obliging to all. He organized the first Congregational Church in Tualatin Plains, and one in Oregon City, and was the getter-up of the Pacific University at Forest Grove; a warm friend to general education and all objects calculated to do good to any and all of his fellow-creatures. But few who knew him did not respect and esteem him for his sincere piety and Christian conduct. He came to the country as a missionary sent out by some of the northwestern churches in the United States, without any definite organization further than sufficient to furnish the means for outfit for himself and associates,—Smith and Littlejohn and their wives,—trusting Providence and their own strong arms and willing hearts to labor and do all they could for a subsistence. Mr. Clark was perhaps the best man that could have been sent with the early settlers. He early gained their confidence and esteem, and was always a welcome visitor among them. He had not that stern commanding manner which is usual to egotists of the clerical order, but was of the mild, persuasive kind, that wins the rough heart and calms the stormy passions. The country is blessed by his having lived in it.

A. T. Smith, the associate of Rev. H. Clark was an honest and substantial farmer, a sincere and devout Christian, a man not forward in forming society, yet firm and stable in his convictions of right; liberal and generous to all objects of real worth; not easily excited, or ambitious of political preferment. His wife seemed, in all her life and actions, to be a suitable helpmeet for him. They came early to this country, and have ever been substantial and useful citizens, and supporters of morality and religion. They were among the earliest settlers at Forest Grove, and the first members of Rev. H. Clark’s church.

P. B. Littlejohn was the opposite of Smith, a confirmed hypochondriac; yet, under excitement that was agreeable to his ideas, a useful man. Owing to his peculiar temperament, or the disease with which he was afflicted, his usefulness, and that of an interesting and Christian wife, were cramped and destroyed. He returned to the States with his family in 1845.

At this point, perhaps a statement of all the names of persons I have been able to collect and recollect, and the year they arrived in the country, will not be uninteresting to the reader. A short history of most of them has already been given.

In the year 1834, Rev. Jason Lee, Rev. Daniel Lee, Cyrus Shepard, and P. L. Edwards, connected with the Methodist Mission; Captain N. Wyeth, American fur trader, and of his party in 1832, S. H. Smith, Burdet, Greeley, Sergeant, Bull, St. Clair, and Whittier (who was helped to or given a passage to the Sandwich Islands by the Hudson’s Bay Company); Brock, a gunsmith; Tibbets, a stone-cutter; Moore, killed by the Blackfeet Indians; Turnbull, who killed himself by overeating at Vancouver. There was also in the country a man by the name of Felix Hathaway, saved from the wreck of the William and Ann. Of this number, Smith, Sergeant, Tibbets, and Hathaway remained. Of the party in 1834, James A. O’Neil, T. J. Hubbard, and Courtney M. Walker remained in the country, making six of Wyeth’s men and one sailor. C. M. Walker came with Lee’s company. With Ewing Young, from California, came, in this year, John McCarty, Carmichael, John Hauxhurst, Joseph Gale, John Howard, Kilborn, Brandywine, and George Winslow, a colored man. By the brig Maryland, Captain J. H. Couch, G. W. Le Breton, John McCaddan, and William Johnson. An English sailor, by the name of Richard or Dick McCary, found his way into the settlement from the Rocky Mountains.

In the year 1835 it does not appear that any settlers arrived in the country. Rev. Samuel Parker visited and explored it under the direction of the American Board of Foreign Missions.

In 1836, Rev. H. Spalding, Dr. M. Whitman, W. H. Gray, Mrs. Eliza Spalding, and Mrs. Narcissa Whitman, missionaries of the American Board, and Rev. Mr. Beaver, Episcopal chaplain at Vancouver, and Mrs. Beaver. There appear to have been no settlers this year; at least, none known to us.

In 1837, Mrs. A. M. Lee, Mrs. S. Shepard, Dr. E. White, Mrs. M. White, A. Beers, Mrs. R. Beers, Miss E. Johnson, W. H. Wilson, Mr. J. Whitcomb, members of the Methodist Episcopal Mission. Second re-enforcement this year: Rev. H. K. W. Perkins, Rev. David Leslie, Mrs. Leslie, Misses Satira, Mary, and Sarah Leslie, Miss Margaret Smith, Dr. J. Bailey, an Englishman, George Gay, and John Turner.

In 1838, Rev. Elkanah Walker, Mrs. Mary Walker, Rev. Cushing Eells, Mrs. Elvira Eells, Rev. A. B. Smith, Mrs. E. Smith, and Mrs. Mary A. Gray, missionaries of the American Board. As laborers under special contract not to trade in furs or interfere with Hudson’s Bay Company’s trade, James Conner, native wife, and one child, and Richard Williams, both from Rocky Mountains. Jesuit priests: Rev. F. N. Blanchet, Rev. Demerse, located at Vancouver and French Prairie.

In 1839, Rev. J. S. Griffin, Mrs. Griffin, Asael Munger, Mrs. Mary Munger, Independent Protestant Mission; Robert Shortess, J. Farnam, Sydney Smith, Mr. Lawson, Rev. Ben. Wright (Independent Methodist), Wm. Geiger, Mr. Keizer, John Edmund Pickernel, a sailor.

In 1840, Mrs. Lee, second wife of Rev. Jason Lee; Rev. J. H. Frost and wife; Rev. A. F. Waller, wife, and two children; Rev. W. W. Kone and wife; Rev. G. Hines, wife, and sister; Rev. L. H. Judson, wife, and two children; Rev. J. L. Parish, wife, and three children; Rev. G. P. Richards, wife, and three children; Rev. A. P. Olley and wife. Laymen: Mr. George Abernethy, wife, and two children; Mr. H. Campbell, wife, and one child; Mr. W. W. Raymond and wife; Mr. H. B. Brewer and wife; Dr. J. L. Babcock, wife, and one child; Rev. Mrs. Daniel Lee; Mrs. David Carter; Mrs. Joseph Holman; Miss E. Phillips. Methodist Episcopal Protestant Mission: Rev. Harvey Clark and wife; P. B. Littlejohn and wife. Independent Protestant Mission: Robert Moore, James Cooke, and James Fletcher, settlers. Jesuit Priest: P. G. De Smet, Flathead Mission.

Rocky Mountain men with native wives: William Craig, Robert or Dr. Newell, J. L. Meek, James Ebbets, William M. Dougherty, John Larison, George Wilkinson, a Mr. Nicholson, and Mr. Algear, and William Johnson, author of the novel, “Leni Leoti; or, the Prairie Flower.” The subject was first written and read before the Lyceum, at Oregon City, in 1843.

In the above list I have given the names of all the American settlers, as near as I can remember them, the list of names I once collected having been lost. I never was fully informed as to the different occupations of all these men. It will be seen that we had in the country in the fall of 1840 thirty-six American settlers, twenty-five of them with native wives; thirty-three American women, thirty-two children, thirteen lay members of the Protestant missions, nineteen ministers (thirteen Methodist, six Congregational), four physicians (three American and one English), three Jesuit priests, and sixty Canadian-French,—making, outside of the Hudson’s Bay Company, one hundred and thirty-seven Americans and sixty-three Canadians, counting the three priests as Canadians.