Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/82

 st 1 FIBST IfANSION IN SAI.EM nes8 and the worthiness of the cause he advocated, and weis, therefore, promptly supplied with forty-two thousand dollars; and fifty persons were assigned to assist him in carrying on the missionary work in the Oregon Country. These workers were distributed among six missions,—Mouth of the Columbia, Willamette Falls, Umpqua, The Dalles, Puget Sound, and the Central Mission on the Willamette.

Archbishop Blanchet and Vicar-General Demers. The presence of the Methodist Missionaries encouraged devout French Canadians of the Willamette as early as 1834 to ask

the Catholic Church to

send missionaries to them.

In 1836 the request was

repeated. In answer to

the call, the Hudson's Bay

Company, two years later,

conveyed two priests from Montreal who were instructed to "establish a mission in the Cowlitz Valley, the reason given being that the British sovereignity south of the Columbia was still undecided.'* Hence for a time those were denied who first applied for religious instruction. Rev. Francis Norbert Blanchet was appointed vicar-general of the Oregon Mission, and the Rev. Modoste Demers was chosen as his assistant. Along their journey to Oregon the ARCHBISHOP F. N. BLANCHET