Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/315

Rh reputation of teaching the first school in Oregon.' So I passed the winter of 1832 and 1833."

I cannot give the exact date when Ball began the school. It was probably late in November or early in December, 1832. He continued to teach until the latter part of February, 1833, when he was assisted by Dr. McLoughlin to start a farm in the Willamette Valley.

John Ball was succeeded, as a teacher of this school at Fort Vancouver, by Solomon H. Smith, who also came with Nathaniel J. Wyeth in 1832. Smith began teaching in the spring of 1833 and continued to teach about eighteen months, until the fall of 1834. He, in turn, was succeeded by Cyrus Shepard. Shepard was a lay Methodist missionary, who came with Rev. Jason Lee and Rev. Daniel Lee and party. These were the first Methodist missioneries. They arrived at Fort Vancouver in September, 1834. As Shepard was not a strong man physicially, he stayed at Fort Vancouver until early in the spring of 1835, while the other Methodist missionaries wero constructing the mission buildings, about ten miles north of Salem, in what is now Marion County. During the fall and winter of 1834 Shepard taught the school at Fort Vancouver. His pupils were about forty-three. Among his pupils were three Japanese, two men and a boy. These were the only survivors, of the crew of seventeen, of a derelict Japanese junk which drifted across the Pacific Ocean and went ashore about fifteen miles south of Cape Flattery, in March, 1833. These Japanese were enslaved by the Indians and cruelly treated.

Dr. McLoughlin learned of these Japanese by means of a rude drawing on paper, depicting three ship-wrecked persons, with a junk on the rocks, and Indians engaged in plundering the junk. How this drawing was received by Dr. McLoughlin I have been unable to learn, as the early books on Oregon merely say that the drawing was received. The junk was laden with rice, cotton cloth, and Japanese porcelain, orna-