Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/308

290 elsewhere shown, a catholic mission was maintained there afterward for some years.

From the sale and abandonment of the Dalles mission to June 1850 there was no protestant mission at that place; but subsequent to the passage of the donation law, and notwithstanding the military reservation of the previous month of May, an attempt was made to revive the methodist claim in that year by surveying and making a claim which took in the old mission site; and in 1854 their agent, Thomas H. Pearne, notified the surveyor general of the fact. In the interim, however, a town had grown up at this place, and certain private individuals and the town officers opposed the pretensions of the methodists. And it would seem from the action of the military authorities at an earlier date that either they differed from the methodist society as to their rights, or were willing to give them an opportunity to recover damages for the appropriation of their property, the former mission premises being located about in the centre of the reservation.

When the amended land law in 1853 reduced the military reservations in Oregon to a mile square, the reserve as laid out still took something more than half of the claim as surveyed by the methodists in 1850. For this the society, by its agent, brought a