Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/139

88 doctrine requires but little elucidation. Happy indeed is the poor, sickly, degraded being here, who can be brought to look forward to riches, health, pleasures, and a glorious existence hereafter. It is the ideality of religion, the poetry of everlasting life.

But though the Mission seemed for a short time to promise some fruit, the expectation was lessened by a return in the first months of 1837 of the former disorders in a more threatening and fatal form. A chief of the Cayuses, having removed in the autumn with his family to the Willamete Valley in order that his children might attend the Mission school, lost two of them in quick succession, and a third became extremely ill. In his alarm he fled to Fort Vancouver with his family, but at the moment the canoe touched the landing the child expired. An incident like this, together with the continued sickness of the inmates of the Mission, produced a dread of the place in the minds of the Indians, and their parents refused the risk of earthly loss even for heavenly gain. At no time were there more than thirty-five or forty pupils in attendance, and of all that were received to the close of 1838, one third died, and the remainder were sickly. When will men learn that in the affairs of the savages the benevolence of civilization curdles into