Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/450



to be looking out for me, coming around Cape Horn, or threading my way up the Willamette as I used to do." On March 12 he passed away at the age of forty-one years.

Sixty-four years afterward, on June 15, 1906, the ashes of Jason Lee were consigned with solemn and impressive ceremonies to the hallowed soil of the Lee mission cemetery at Salem. Great men from four great states were there ; states carved from the territory of the old Oregon country. These men, speaking above his ashes, accorded him the honor that is his due as pioneer, patriot and priest.

MAECUS WHITMAN

Among those who bore an important part in the beginning of Oregon was Dr. Whitman, the missionary of Walla Walla. Marcus Whitman, third son of Beza and Alice Whitman, was born at Rushville, Yates county. New York, September 4, 1802. He was descended from English ancestors who had settled in Massa- chusetts early in the seventeenth century. His father died when he was eight years of age and shortly after Marcus was sent to live with his grandfather, Samuel Whitman, of Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he lived for nine years, and received the greater part of his education in his professional studies.

His first choice of a profession was that of the gospel ministry ; but the way not being open for his entering this, he studied medicine, first privately with Dr. Ira Bryant, a physician of his native town, and later in the medical col- lege of Fairfield, New York, from which he was graduated in 1824. The next ten years of his life he spent chiefly in the practice of his profession, first in Canada and later in Wheeler, New York, with an interval in which he engaged with his brother in running a saw mill ; an experience which was to stand him in good stead in his later life in Oregon.

Dr. Whitman seems never to have been quite reconciled to the relinquishment of his early purpose of entering the Christian ministrJ^ His natural tastes, had he followed out his first purpose, would doubtless have led him either to some foreign field or to the frontiers of his own country. Being a man of strong and mus- cular frame, of indomitable will and courageous and adventurous spirit, he was not one to be content to settle in the quiet and comfort of older communities and build on other men's foundations. He was a man quick to hear and prompt to respond to the call of human needs, and counted it rather a joy if such re- sponse called him to face danger and hardsips. The opportunity to give full vent to his pent-up desire for an active life of ministry to his fellow men came at the close of his first ten years of professional life ; aud it came in such a way as to make to one of his nature and ambition an irresistible appeal.

In the early thirties, at a time when the various missionary societies of the east were warmly interested in missions to the native races of the Mississippi valley, an incident occurred that directed their interest and effort particularly to the region west of the Rocky Mountains. A delegation of four Indian chiefs from one of the tribes located in the Oregon country appeared in St. Louis, on an unusual mission. Having heard from explorers and traders something of the white man 's religion, they had been impressed by what they had heard, and came to try to find some one that would tell them more of this religion. The