Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/217

166 two white men engaged, the return journey was more easily accomplished. On the 5th of October, eight days from the Willamette, Lee arrived at the Dalles with fourteen head of cattle, to find that Perkins and his wife had gone to the old Mission to spend several months. Thus he was left during the greater part of the winter alone, with the exception of a man named Anderson, who had been hired some time previously to assist in roofing the house. As timber for fencing and for farming utensils was required before spring, and harness and implements had to be made, there was little time for mission work. Perkins returned to the Dalles with his wife and infant son in February, and farming was begun, part of the ground being held on shares with the natives, who helped to fence and plough it. But the soil, being newly stirred, did not yield abundantly; and the crop, small as it was, was partly stolen by other Indians, which so discouraged the laboring savages that they abandoned work and took, without leave, the vegetables raised by the missionaries. The latter, however, persevered, building another house in the summer of 1839, which was used for a church, and improving their home. And here for the present we will leave them, to return to the affairs of the parent Mission.

From this point we regard Jason Lee less as a missionary than as an American colonizer. When he first conceived the idea of appropriating the valley of the Willamette for the Methodist church under the protection of the United States is not very clear, for Kelley's account of Lee's intentions is open to the charge of prejudice, the former feeling himself unjustly treated. But there can be little doubt that the scheme took form on being encouraged by Slacum to look for the support of government in sustaining American supremacy south of the Columbia.

Lee had been long enough in Oregon when the first reënforcement arrived to have discovered that the tribes