Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/80



70 READ BAIN

In March, 1838, Daniel Lee and H. Kl W. Perkins selected a site and established a Mission at The Dalles. Daniel Lee took fourteen head of cattle from the Willamette station over the Cascades, reaching The Dalles in October. He spent most the winter there, alone. The station prospered very badly but the next summer a combined church and home were added to the settlement. The Indians were very anxious to hear the gospel. They used to come in great numbers to the Sunday meeting. Soon the Mission school and Sabbath school wer'S in a flourishing condition. Doubtless the Indians had other reasons than a burning desire for knowledge as has been above intimated.

Bancroft (p. 168) analyzes Lee's motives at some length in regard to establishing these Mission posts ; makes him out a colonizer rather than a missionary; argues that Lee knew the Columbia river Indians, all of them west of the Cascades, were a hopelessly diseased, depraved and degenerated race, not worth saving if indeed that were possible. But he knew the missionary-mad people back east would never support a colonizing policy, nor would the Hudson's Bay Company per- mit it, so he went ahead, setting these stakes of empire in the name of God and the salvation of the souls of these scrofulous Indians. He had too much help for missionary work, and not enough for his plans to bring more Americans to Oregon.

In March, 1838, he had visited the Umpqua region, intending to establish a station, but the hostility of the Indians and the inaccessibility of the region caused him to forego it.

In April, he started his famous trip to the east, returning in 1840 on the "Lausanne" with the needed reinforcements. It was on this trip that he memorialized Congress to the effect that it should extend its laws over Oregon.

The station at The Dalles was reinforced. Daniel Lee and J. H. Frost established another at Clatsop Plains, near the mouth of the Columbia, in the summer of 1840. It soon be- came a flourishing settlement. Very little benefit came to the degenerate Clatsop Indians, however.