Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/249

198 the harmony of the Methodist colonists arose to a great degree from the unavoidable trials of a new settlement in the hands of inexperienced persons.

It does not appear, from anything discovered in the writings of the missionaries, that Jason Lee told his associates of his correspondence with agents of the government. Had the disaffected members of the Mission known that they had been used to carry out a colonization project, some expression of their resentment on finding themselves the victims of so worldly an artifice would somewhere appear. But the colonization scheme is never alluded to as a cause of their disappointment.

White having resigned, Babcock was called from the Dalles to the Willamette, where the usual summer sickness was disabling the Mission. Chills and fever, ending in a low typhoid, prostrated the white population and carried off the natives.