Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/176

 GEORGE H. HIMES

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The rules of the Methodist Episcopal Church were then read by Mr. Lee, after which he baptized the young man just married and received him into the church and administered the Lord's Supper. At this point a young man who had been raised a Quaker and who for some time had shown a change of heart, asked to be baptized and partake of the Lord's Sup-

This man's name was Webley Hauxhurst, and I have per. been informed that he lived a consistent, well ordered Christian Thus it was that the ordilife until his death fifty years later. nances of the church were observed for the first time, according to the Protestant form,

on the Pacific Coast.

The following winter Lee felt that a special effort should be made to arouse a greater interest in the religious work of Oregon, and began to realize that it was not alone to the Indians that the Gospel should be preached, but that the gradushould also have ally increasing population of the whites

Christian privileges. With this in view he started east overland in March, 1838, carrying with him a memorial to Congress from the American settlers in Oregon which aroused

such a degree of interest on the part of the President and Congress that five thousand dollars was given out of the "Secret Service" fund of the Government to aid in Americanizing

Oregon. Lee's efforts produced a sensation, arousing the missionary authorities of the Methodist Episcopal Church to vigorous action. This resulted in the equipment of the Ship Lausanne for a voyage around the Horn to Oregon, and upon October 25, 1839, she set sail for the Far West carrying 51 souls, known as the "Great Reinforcement/' arriving in the Columbia

May, 1840, and finally debarking at Vancouver on June 1st. Soon after, three buildings were erected in Salem the first there and thus that place became the headquarters of the in

Methodist mission

Lausanne were

field.

The preaching

force brought on the

allotted as follows Nisqually, Puget Sound. Richmond; Clatsop, J. H. Frost; Umpqua, Gustavus Hines, W. W. Kone; The Dalles, Daniel Lee, H. K. W. Per-

J.



P.

Willamette Station, Daniel Leslie Willamette Falls, A. F. Waller. kins