Page:The Early Indian Wars of Oregon.djvu/36

18 from time to time several independent missionaries gave temporary aid to these widely scattered missions.

Unlike the Methodists, the Presbyterians abstained from politics, and had no complaints to make to the home government of the tyranny and aggressions of the Hudson s Bay Company; or, if they ever felt in any way aggrieved, it does not appear in their correspondence with the home board. They had a different class of Indians to deal with from those in the Wallamet and lower Columbia valleys—more intelligent, more imperious, and for both these reasons, more dangerous as well as more interesting. To keep the peace with the Cayuses had on some occasions required all the tact and influence of the fur company.

Allied to them were the Walla Wallas and the Nez Perces, the latter being a large and powerful tribe, of a better temper than their more southern relatives, who boasted of their compact of friendship with Lewis and Clarke, and of having always kept it.

In 1835 Rev. Samuel Parker of Ithaca, New York, and Dr. Marcus Whitman traveled together to the Rocky mountains, escorted by the American Fur Company, where, meeting the Flatheads and Nez Perces, they became con vinced of their desire for teachers, and Whitman returned to the states to bring out assistants, only finding, however, Miss Narcissa Prentiss of Prattsburg, New York, whom he married, Mr. and Mrs. Spalding, and Mr. Gray, who could be induced to join him at that time, and who journeyed with him to the Columbia river in 1836, where they were received literally with open arms by the gentlemen of the Hudson s Bay Company at Fort Walla Walla and Fort Vancouver, their unconscious heroism in undertaking a land journey of thousands of miles, in company with mountain men, to live among savages in order to teach them, being appreciated by these gentlemen as it was not at that time by the missionaries themselves.