Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/228

166 average height, and powerful in accord. The building- first constructed was 18×32 feet and one story high. It was occupied four weeks after their arrival on the spot, though not yet completed. This was the first American home built on the Pacific coasts or on the western side of the Rocky mountains.

Before the completion of the building, Indian children of the prairie were receiving instruction and care. October 19th, Jason Lee preached his first sermon near the mission, in the house of Joseph Gervais, of French prairie, as a large tract of land between the Willamette and the present town of Gervais was called. The location chosen was in some ways unfortunate, but all considerations of comfort or future advantage were properly set aside by Lee in his determination to perform the work to which he was called. The half-breed children of the prairie were numerous, and many Indians traveled the river and lower trails or made their homes near French prairie. Here was the most favorable place for reaching the people, and so the mission site was chosen near the river, on land too low, as it proved later, being subject to inundation in river floods, and peculiarly miasmatic.

It was the intention of the church to Christianize the Indians; the message of the pilgrims to St. Louis had evoked a remarkable response from the eastern churches, and it was doubtless intended that Jason Lee should establish himself among the "Flatheads." The people who sent him knew nothing of Nez Perces, and Lee overshot the actual mark five hundred miles by coming to the Willamette valley, but the Indians of our vicinity were flatheaded as any, and as fit subjects of missionary aid as could be found anywhere. They were not the most hopeful subjects, but the first great missionary of Christianity seems not to have balanced very carefully the advantage of preaching to Greeks or Romans rather than to Hebrews.

Among the resident Indians of the Willamette were Chinooks, Multnomas, Clackamas, Calapooias, Mollallas, and other tribes, whose names in some instances still pertain to the land they lived in. These Indians, like most of their race, had no fixed dwelling-place. When the camas or wapato or berries were ready for gathering or digging, they migrated in bands to places where these things were to be had. When salmon were plenty at the falls or down the Columbia the men would be off fishing. In the fall there was game in abundance, particularly wild fowl, and the tribes followed these necessary objects of their lives from place to place over large tracts, from the river to the mountains, from the mountains to the sea. The aborigines had been rapidly decreasing in number for half a century or more. Their traditions tell of terrible pestilence among them even before the first contact with the white race on the Pacific, half a century before Lee's coming. The year after Lee established the mission, the Multnomas, living on Wapato island and the adjoining lowlands, died by hundreds from measles, having been infected from a trading vessel in the river. The diseases contracted from the whites, had greatly reduced the population of the Willamette, and soon after the establishment of the mission, sickness of a dangerous sort prevailed among the Indian children, who had, up to that time, been received in considerable numbers, and begun their new duties as proselytes of the mission with encouraging zeal and interest. The sickness seemed to cling about the place for years. It was a fever, and is explained by some as malarial, due to the cultivation of the moist lowlands. Jason Lee and his two assistants gave the utmost care possible to the sick, and Daniel Lee was compelled to seek relief from labor and sickness by a voyage to the Sandwich islands the following winter.

Like certain Asiatics, our Indians held the medicine man responsible when his patient died; this spirit of vengeance, nearly cost Lee and his companions their lives, more than once. Some other Indians, grateful for kindness shown them, gave Lee warning.