Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/282

276 Strong, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; among soldiers of the Civil War, Kirby Smith, the last Confederate general to surrender. His father was a Minute Man, and hastened to the defense of Concord and Lexington, and was with General Washington at the siege of Boston, and in all the campaigns in New Jersey. At the close of the Revolutionary War the elder Lee settled in the then almost impenetrable wilds of Vermont, in a location that was afterwards divided by the boundary line between the United States and Canada. The town, which lies on both sides of the line, is called Rock Island on the Canadian side of the line, and Derby Line on the American side. By the location of the boundary the Lees were left a stone's throw from the line on the Canadian side.

Converted in 1826, Jason Lee entered Wilbraham Academy at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, the following year, and spent the remainder of his life in the United States. Upon his arrival in Oregon, accompanied by his nephew, Daniel Lee, and Cyrus Shepard and P. L. Edwards, he began work by opening a school for Indian children in a log house they erected a few miles below the place where we stand to-night.

Mr. Lee had an adequate conception of the country, its importance, and his great work, even before he left the Atlantic States, because he had visited Washington, D.C., prior to his coming, where he interviewed President Andrew Jackson, to whom he unfolded his plans and from whom he secured executive indorsement and a promise of assistance. On his way West he held religious services at Fort Hall in what is now Southern Idaho, July 27, 1834, preaching from the text:

"Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." I Cor. x:31.