Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/227

Rh back into the Clearwater country to find their people, but Dr. McLoughlin advised the establishment of the mission in the Willamette valley in the neighborhood of French prairie, where a number of former employes of the Hudson's Bay Company were settled on farms, and where many Indians gathered. This advice ought to set at rest any idea that Dr. McLoughlin was opposed to Lee's enterprise, for it would have been easy enough to second his own desire to go far into the interior, where the difficulties in the way would have been perhaps insurmountable. McLoughlin was a Catholic indeed, and his hearty concurrence in Jason Lee's plan to Christianize the Indians marks the liberal, magnanimous gentleman.

When Lee determined to visit the locality proposed by Dr. McLoughlin, the company ofifered him every facility. Boats, boatmen and provisions were freely given him, and on September 29, 1834, the two Lees started upon their quest. The brig "May Dacre," which had left Boston months before with Wyeth's trading outfit and that of the mission, had arrived in the Columbia and lay near Warrior rock, perhaps because the river was low and navigation difficult—perhaps because Wyeth preferred not to intrude upon the Hudson's Bay people at Vancouver. The Lees dropped down the river to the brig and spent a few days there, looking over the country where Warren now stands and the lowland meadows at the mouth of Lewis river to consider those localities as possible sites for their mission. Much of that beautiful region is unchanged even to our day. The same oaks which Jason Lee saw on the Scappoose plains and on the velvet sward of Sauvies island stand there to this day, and the cottonwoods that fringe the Columbia and the deep, quiet channel of the Multnoma, as Willamette slough was called, have sprung from the grand ancestral trees that grew in the same spots. Proceeding up the river they entered the greater Multnoma, and there, too, the willow-fringed shore below St. Johns, the grand oaks of Swan island, the laurel-crowned promontory at University point and the green meadows and islands at the north of the site of Portland must have been much as they are in our day. Probably the remarkable Indian houses visited by Captain Clarke near St. Johns were still as Clarke saw them; but where now this city stands was a dense forest of firs and spruce and hemlocks that stretched from the river shore to the mountain-tops west. The impression the virgin wilderness and sweet, sylvan shores of the Multnoma made upon these wanderers must have been amazing and delightful. The Columbia, until within a few miles of Vancouver, is solemn, tremendous, appalling in its majesty; the Willamette—the "Green Water"—is inviting, tranquil, arcadian.

This journey was made by way of the Columbia westward to the lower end of Sauvies island (then called Wapato) and to Wyeth's trading station where lay the brig "May Dacre" which had brought out the mission freight along with Captain Wyeth's trading stock. The island was encompassed by the journey up the inland or western channel of the Multnoma, upon which Wyeth established his fort, on the southwestern point of Wapato island, now included in the Jonathan Moore claim. A stock of necessary articles for immediate use was taken with the boat at Wyeth's place, and the party of missionaries, Jason and Daniel Lee and P. L. Edwards, in a Hudson's Bay boat and manned by servants of the company, proceeded up the Multnoma. They remained two nights at Wyeth's and camped two nights on the way to the falls. Here Indians assisted in the portage of the boat and goods, and the journey to the site of the mission was completed October 6th.

The season was already too far advanced for beginning such an undertaking as the construction of a mission house, but Jason Lee was resolved upon its completion for winter use as a house for himself and his companions, and as a school and chapel. Dr. McLoughlin had sent up oxen and a number of cows for the mission. Jason Lee was a New England frontiersman and handy with the axe and care of cattle, and the management of the clearing, hauling, and building were his personal care and labor. He was a colossal man, eight inches above