The Cayuse and other tribes of the Columbia Plateau made their first
contact with Christianity through fur traders. Many of the employees of
the Hudson’s Bay Company were Roman Catholics—French Canadians and
Iroquois. Although the company did not at first bring priests into
Oregon for its employees, the Indians learned a little about the new
faith from these Hudson’s Bay men. Also, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent a
few Indian boys to an Anglican mission school at the Red River
Settlement in Canada.
These were the Indians among whom the Whitmans settled. Proud of their
heritage, the Cayuse were yet interested in new things and the new ideas
that the Whitmans introduced. Because of their age-old beliefs, they
were not willing to completely surrender their own way of life.
[Illustration: J. M. Stanley sketched this view of the Tshimakain
mission in 1853. In the left foreground is an Indian burial on
poles.]
The arrival of the missionaries resulted in new stresses and emotions
among the Cayuse. Problems were created which neither the Indians nor
the whites fully understood. Previously the Cayuse had been able to
survive the challenges of their environment. But the old ways were to
prove inadequate in surmounting the new difficulties, real or imagined,
that arose with the coming of the white man. The missionaries, too,
found much that was strange in their new surroundings and strove to
adjust themselves to the primitive land.
_Reinforcements for Oregon_
Their first, short winter at Waiilatpu passed swiftly for the
missionaries. But by summer a dissatisfied and restless William Gray
left Oregon, without Whitman’s knowledge but with Spalding’s approval,
to visit the East. Gray was unhappy with his position of mechanic and
helper to the mission. He was ambitious to become a missionary in his
own right, but neither Whitman nor Spalding felt he was qualified for
such work. In Boston, Gray was coolly received by the American Board,
but the trip gained him two things: he attended medical college briefly,
and he married Mary Augusta Dix.
At this time the American Board was recruiting the only reinforcements
it was to send to Oregon. In March 1838 Gray and his wife joined this
group, and the party headed overland for Oregon. Besides the Grays there
were tall, shy Elkanah Walker and his cheerful wife, Mary;
serious-minded Cushing Eells and his frail-looking wife, Myra; and
fault-finding but intelligent Asa Bowen Smith and his sickly Sarah.
Before they reached St. Louis, they were joined by Cornelius Rogers, a
bachelor. In addition to the usual hazards, the journey was complicated
by a clashing of strong personalities. One thing the new missionaries
agreed upon, however, was that none of them wished to be assigned to the
same station as William Gray.
Upon the new missionaries’ arrival at Waiilatpu, a meeting was held to
decide a course for the future. Agreement was soon reached on the
composition of the stations. The Grays were to join the Spaldings at
Lapwai. The Smiths and Cornelius Rogers were to stay with the Whitmans.
The Walkers and Eellses, the two couples among the newcomers who got
along best, were to open a new station to the north among the Spokan
Indians near Fort Colville. But these plans were to be changed in part.
Walker and Eells visited the Spokan tribe that autumn and selected a
site at Tshimakain (“the place of springs”). But winter was close at
hand, and they returned to Waiilatpu to await spring. The Grays went to
Lapwai, where Spalding and Gray quarreled throughout the winter. At
Waiilatpu, the Whitmans’ little house was crowded to an uncomfortable
degree. Although the new mission house was far enough along for the
Smiths to move into it in December, the first house then had to make
room for the arrival of Mary Walker’s first son.
Such crowded conditions were to lead to severe irritations before the
winter was over. The diaries and the letters home show that hurt
feelings were an all too common occurrence, and feuds began to gnaw at
the unity of the Oregon mission. There were forebodings, which later
proved correct, that the antagonisms of that winter would hurt the
future work of the missionaries.
Among the disagreements was one between Whitman and Smith. It became
evident that the two would not be able to work together. Always the
pacifier, Whitman took the initiative by offering to leave Waiilatpu and
begin a new station. But the arrival of spring brought a new spirit of
cooperation. The Walkers and Eellses left for Tshimakain, and Whitman
and Smith patched up their relations. Nevertheless, they did separate;
but it was the Smiths who left. Asa and his wife moved to Kamiah, 50
miles up the Clearwater from Spalding, where they began a new mission
among the Nez Percé. By the summer of 1839 there were four American
Board stations in Oregon: Waiilatpu among the Cayuse; Lapwai and Kamiah
among the Nez Percé, and Tshimakain in the country of the Spokan. Of
these, the one most fully developed and the one destined to be the
center for the Oregon field was Waiilatpu.
_A Community Rises at Waiilatpu_
The number of people at Waiilatpu in the winter of 1838-39 convinced
Whitman that work on the new mission house had to be speeded up.
Fortunately, he was able to hire Asahel Munger, who was a skilled
carpenter. Munger had come out to Oregon as an independent missionary
only to find that a person could not be independent in that vast,
unsettled country. He eagerly accepted Whitman’s offer.
The attractive, substantial mission house was built of the same
materials as the first house. The new, T-shaped building had a wooden
frame, walls of adobe bricks, and a roof of poles, straw, and earth. The
walls were smoothed and whitewashed with a solution made from river
mussel shells. Later, enough paint was acquired from the Hudson’s Bay
Company to paint the doors and window frames green, the interior
woodwork gray, and the pine floors yellow. The main section of the house
was a story-and-a-half high with three rooms on the ground floor and
space for bedrooms above. From it extended a long, single-story wing
which contained a kitchen, another bedroom, and a classroom. An
out-kitchen, storeroom, and other facilities were later added to the
wing.
_text continued on page 48_
[Illustration: The press that printed the first books in the Pacific
Northwest now reposes in the museum of the Oregon Historical
Society, Portland.]
_The Mission Press_
_In 1837 Henry Spalding became the first missionary to try writing a
book in the Nez Percé language. But it was soon discovered that the
alphabet devised by him was not adaptable to the Indians’ tongue and
this 72-page “primer” was never printed._
_The next year, having received a new printing press themselves, the
American Board missionaries in Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands)
offered an older press to the Oregon missionaries. This, the first
printing press in the Pacific Northwest, arrived at Lapwai in May 1839.
With it came Edwin Hall who was to assist in starting the operation._
_Eight days after setting up the press, the missionaries had proudly
produced 400 copies of the first book printed in old Oregon. The
authors, using an adaption of the alphabet employed in Hawaii, were
Henry and Eliza Spalding and Cornelius Rogers. The significance of this
achievement is not lessened by the fact that this book had only eight
pages._
_Between 1839 and 1845 a total of nine books were printed. The most
elaborate of these was the Gospel according to St. Matthew turned out in
Nez Percé by Spalding. All but one of the books were printed in the Nez
Percé language; that one was a 16-page primer in Spokan translated by
Elkanah Walker, the copies being stitched, pressed, and bound by his
wife, Mary. All these imprints are now quite rare, and of one only a
single copy is known to exist. This is the Nez Percé Laws, drawn up by
Indian Agent Elijah White in 1842._
_Reducing the Nez Percé language to writing was not an easy task. Asa
Smith, the best linguist in the group, wrote:_
_“[The] number of words in the language is immense & their variations
are almost beyond description. Every word is limited & definite in its
meaning & the great difficulty is to find terms sufficiently general.
Again the power of compounding words is beyond description.” But even as
he struggled with this problem, Smith was convinced of the necessity of
books: “We must have books in the native language, schools, & the
Scriptures translated, or we are but beating the air....”_
_By 1846 the missionaries had become pessimistic about their progress in
publishing. The amount of effort required for just a few pages was
tremendous. Their best linguists—Smith and Cornelius Rogers—were no
longer with the mission. The Indians were not as receptive to the
printed word as the missionaries had hoped. In that year the press was
moved from Lapwai to The Dalles, and this first publishing venture came
to a close. After the Whitman massacre, the press was used in the
Williamette Valley by some men who were among the first newspaper
publishers in the Pacific Northwest._
_The immensity of this undertaking can be grasped only if one remembers
the primitiveness of the land in 1839 when the missionaries distributed
the first pages ever printed in the Oregon Country._
[Illustration: (uncaptioned)]
[Illustration: Page from _Nez Percé Laws_ printed by Henry Spalding
on the mission press. WHITMAN COLLEGE]