Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/111

Rh Give us more men like them, old-fashioned, brave,

True to the truth; men that have made the Church

Mighty, and glad, and songful in the past."

Each age, each epoch, has had its pioneers. Frequently the motive actuating them was based on a spiritual or religious impulse that impelled them to face dangers, privations, persecution, and death itself in their desire to secure for themselves and their children liberty of thought, of worship, of action.

The Pilgrim Fathers, from their exile in Holland, looked forward to a land as a home where they could worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. More than three centuries have passed since the Mayflower landed in midwinter on the granite shores of New England. During that period the face of the world has changed, but throughout all the changes the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers has taken root in widely scattered centers and entered very largely into the life of nations and particularly into that of the Oregon country.

The impulse which furnished the urge that caused the Pilgrim Fathers to face the dangers of an almost unknown ocean and still less known land, peopled as it was by savages, differed from that which caused the Oregon pioneer missionaries to face a journey even more hazardous and trying than that the Pilgrims faced. While the call was spiritual and religious it was not for themselves but for others the pioneer missionaries faced a path full of peril and which only the high call of duty, based on a deeply religious spirit, would have prompted them to take.

It is said that in 1832 a council was held by the chiefs of the Flat Head Indians to consider a story they had heard of a white man's God. It may have been from an occasional trapper they first heard the story, but their