Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/252

246 Nor would the purposes of the early settlers have been subserved by the bringing of this country by any man fully to the knowledge of the civilized world. It was to their interests rather that both the country and its inhabitants remain as long as possible both wild and unknown.

When, therefore, Jason Lee set foot on Oregon soil it marked the coming into this region of a wholly new purpose. Not all that has resulted from his coming was intended or dreamed of at the first. It was the people he sought, not the country; it was for their enlightenment in the life and hopes of the gospel that he crossed the continent and made his home among them, not for the exploiting of their country and the enrichment of himself through their toil.

It was one of the great sorrows of his life that he was compelled to see those for whose sake he came, and to whom for years be delighted to minister, waste away with disease and fail from the land, until at last the people that once gathered in his home and to his ministry were no more.

Coincident with the rapid decay of the Indian was the coming in increasing numbers of the white man. Painful as the failing of the native people was to the warm and earnest heart of Jason Lee, and disappointing as it was to his first and highest desires for his mission, he was not long in recognizing the changed conditions of his work in Oregon, or in adapting himself to them. Here at the seat of the original mission his mission to the Indian was practically closed at the end of six years. The Indian, parent and child, was gone. With a wasting away, unspeakably sad, he saw the tribe once numerous, which had gathered to his ministry, fall day by day under the ravages of disease, and himself powerless to arrest its decay.

The object of his ministry was now no longer the same, but his unselfish purpose to serve his fellowmen was unchanged. The white man who had come to Oregon