Oregon missionaries

Last updated

The Oregon missionaries were pioneers who settled in the Oregon Country of North America starting in the 1830s dedicated to bringing Christianity to local Native Americans. [1] There had been missionary efforts prior to this, such as those sponsored by the Northwest Company with missionaries from the Church of England starting in 1819. [2] The Foreign Mission movement was already 15 years underway by 1820, but it was difficult to find missionaries willing to go to Oregon, as many wanted to go to the east, to India or China. [1] It was not until the 1830s, when a schoolmaster from Connecticut, Hall Jackson Kelley, created his "American Society for the Settlement of the Oregon Country," that more interest and support for Oregon missionaries grew. [1] Around the same time, four Nez Perce arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831, with accounts differencing as to if these travelers were asking for “the book of life,” an idea used by Protestant missionaries, or if they asked for “Blackrobes,” meaning Jesuits, thus Catholic missionaries. Either way this inspired Christian missionaries to travel to the Oregon Territory. [2] Oregon missionaries played a political role, as well as a religious one, as their missions established US political power in an area in which the Hudson’s Bay Company, operating under the British government, maintained a political interest in the Oregon country. [3] Such missionaries had an influential impact on the early settlement of the region, establishing institutions that became the foundation of United States settlement of the Pacific Northwest.

Contents

Wyeth-Lee Party

In 1834, New York Methodist minister Jason Lee came to the Oregon Country as the first of these missionaries, to establish the first American settlement and to convert the native population. [3] The party was called the Wyeth-Lee Party as Lee had contracted with Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who was going on his second trading expedition, to accompany him. [3] The party set out on April 28, 1834, traveling independently from the American Fur Company's caravan headed for the same destination. [4] Lee built a mission school for Indians in the Willamette Valley at the site of present-day Salem, Oregon. [3] The school evolved from a mission school to a secondary school called the Oregon Institute, eventually becoming Willamette University, [3] the oldest university on the West Coast.

Whitman-Spalding Party

In 1835, Dr. Marcus Whitman made his initial journey west from New York, past the Rocky Mountains and into California. [4] 1836, Marcus Whitman made the same trip, this time with his new wife, Narcissa Whitman, and another missionary couple, Henry Harmon Spalding (who had been jilted by Narcissa) and his wife Eliza Spalding. Narcissa and Eliza were the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains. [4] [5]

The Whitman’s reached Fort Walla Walla on October 26, 1838, and founded a mission at Waiilatpu, about 25 miles east of Fort Wallo Wallo in the Walla Walla Valley, then the territory of the Cayuse Indians, in the present-day state of Washington. The Spalding’s founded a mission among the Nez Perce Indians at Lapwai, at the foot of Thunder Mountain, in present-day Idaho. [4] Henry Spalding is credited with the creation of the Protestant Ladder, used to teach natives history from Creation to ascent into Heaven. This style of teaching, using a long strip of paper or cloth, was based on the Catholic Ladder used by Catholic Missionaries in the region. [6]

Catholic Missionaries

Catholic missionaries in Oregon Territory followed two paths into the region, with missionaries, such as Father Francis Norbert Blanchet and Father Modeste Demers, coming from Quebec in 1837 and a later group of missionaries following a path similar to the Protestant missionaries coming from the Eastern America, such as Father Pierre-Jean De Smet in 1841. [7]

Catholic missionary work in Oregon Territory officially began when Fr. Francis Norbert Blanchet was appointed Vicar-General of Oregon Country by Archbishop Joseph Signay of Quebec in April 1838. Fr. Blanchet and Fr. Modest Demers arrived in the region at Fort Vancouver on November 24 1838. [8] Originally the missionaries used hymns and books which had been translated into the Chinook Jargon, a language used commonly among different native groups of the region for trade, in their conversion efforts. Realizing that the ideas and concepts within Catholicism were not coming across to their audiences, Fr. Blanchet began using carved shale sticks in his conversion efforts in April 1839, during a visit to the Cowlitz settlement. The shale stick, referred to as the Catholic Ladder, was carved with representations of Christian History. These shale sticks were then distributed to Native chiefs, starting in October 1839, to teach Catholicism. Soon after, the Catholic Ladder began to be produced in paper copies and later massed produced for distribution in the Pacific Northwest with Quebec church leaders arranging for the printing and shipping of 2,000 to the region. [8] Later, Protestant missionaries began using their own version of the ladder, with Henry Spalding being credited with creating the Protestant Ladder using some images from the Catholic Ladder and adding his own. Both the Catholic and Protestant ladders would also represent the opposing domination as heathens. [6]

In 1841, The Rocky Mountain Mission in the Pacific Northwest was started by Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet and became the most sought-after mission post among Jesuits. The majority of Jesuit missionaries were Italian, owing to instability at home during the period, but missionaries from other nations came to region as well. [9]

Blanchet was made Bishop in 1843, along with the region being made into an Apostolic Vicariate which reached from the Arctic in the North, the Rockies in the East, and the US-Mexican border in the South. Later, in 1846, the region was made into the Ecclesiastical Province of Oregon with Blanchet becoming the archbishop of the archiepiscopal see of Oregon City. This made Oregon the second Ecclesiastical Province created in the US. [7]

Catholics in the region faced persecution by the majority Protestant white settlers, with Father Augustin Magliore Blanchet, Francis Blanchet’s brother, being blamed for the Whitman Massacre in 1847, despite only arriving in Walla Walla three months prior to the events. [7]

Legacy of Early Oregon Missionaries

Missionary work in the Oregon country continued into the 1850s, though in 1853, the Washington territory was established, separate from the Oregon territory to which it had previously belonged. [10] The success in converting Native Americans to Christianity was varied. In some cases, the Indians were very suspicious of the missionaries, and this suspicion only increased when many of the Indians contracted diseases that were introduced by missionaries and White settlers. [11]

As tensions between native tribes and White missionaries rose during the 1850s, resulting in small-scale wars between settlers and natives, like the Rogue River War, missionary work in Oregon was increasingly targeted at White immigrants from the eastern parts of the US, rather than native populations. [10]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cayuse people</span> A Native tribe of present-day northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, USA

The Cayuse are a Native American tribe in what is now the state of Oregon in the United States. The Cayuse tribe shares a reservation and government in northeastern Oregon with the Umatilla and the Walla Walla tribes as part of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The reservation is located near Pendleton, Oregon, at the base of the Blue Mountains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcus Whitman</span> 19th-century American missionary

Marcus Whitman was an American physician and missionary. In 1836, Marcus Whitman led an overland party by wagon to the West. He and his wife, Narcissa, along with Reverend Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza, and William Gray, founded a mission at present-day Walla Walla, Washington in an effort to convert local Indians to Christianity. In the winter of 1842, Whitman went back east, returning the following summer with the first large wagon train of settlers across the Oregon Trail. These new settlers encroached on the Cayuse Indians living near the Whitman Mission and were unsuccessful in their efforts to Christianize the tribe. Following the deaths of many nearby Cayuse from an outbreak of measles, some remaining Cayuse accused Whitman of murder, suggesting that he had administered poison and was a failed shaman. In retaliation, a group of Cayuse killed the Whitmans and eleven other settlers on November 30, 1847, an event that came to be known as the Whitman massacre. This led to continuing warfare between settlers and the Cayuse which reduced their numbers further.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitman massacre</span> 1847 murder of American missionaries by Cayuse Native Americans near Walla Walla, Washington

The Whitman massacre refers to the killing of American missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, along with eleven others, on November 29, 1847. They were killed by a small group of Cayuse men who accused Whitman of poisoning 200 Cayuse in his medical care during an outbreak of measles that included the Whitman household. The killings occurred at the Whitman Mission at the junction of the Walla Walla River and Mill Creek in what is now southeastern Washington near Walla Walla. The massacre became a decisive episode in the U.S. settlement of the Pacific Northwest, causing the United States Congress to take action declaring the territorial status of the Oregon Country. The Oregon Territory was established on August 14, 1848, to protect the white settlers.

The Cayuse War was an armed conflict that took place in the Northwestern United States from 1847 to 1855 between the Cayuse people of the region and the United States Government and local American settlers. Caused in part by the influx of disease and settlers to the region, the immediate start of the conflict occurred in 1847 when the Whitman massacre took place at the Whitman Mission near present-day Walla Walla, Washington when thirteen people were killed in and around the mission. Over the next few years the Provisional Government of Oregon and later the United States Army battled the Native Americans east of the Cascades. This was the first of several wars between the Native Americans and American settlers in that region that would lead to the negotiations between the United States and Native Americans of the Columbia Plateau, creating a number of Indian reservations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitman Mission National Historic Site</span> National Historic Site of the United States

Whitman Mission National Historic Site is a United States National Historic Site located just west of Walla Walla, Washington, at the site of the former Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu. On November 29, 1847, Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa Whitman, and 11 others were slain by Native Americans of the Cayuse. The site commemorates the Whitmans, their role in establishing the Oregon Trail, and the challenges encountered when two cultures meet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry H. Spalding</span>

Henry Harmon Spalding (1803–1874) and his wife Eliza Hart Spalding (1807–1851) were prominent Presbyterian missionaries and educators working primarily with the Nez Perce in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The Spaldings and their fellow missionaries were among the earliest Americans to travel across the western plains, through the Rocky Mountains and into the lands of the Pacific Northwest to their religious missions in what would become the states of Idaho and Washington. Their missionary party of five, including Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa and William H. Gray, joined with a group of fur traders to create the first wagon train along the Oregon Trail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliza Hart Spalding</span> American missionary

Eliza Hart Spalding (1807–1851) was an American missionary who joined an Oregon missionary party with her husband Henry H. Spalding and settled among the Nez Perce People called the nimiipuu in Lapwai, Idaho. She was a well-educated woman who was among the first missionaries to learn a Native American language. She developed a written version of the language and printed Bible story lessons and hymns in the Nez Perce language. Her hymnal was the first book written in the Nez Perce language. She taught hundreds of native people by first teaching a few people a lesson or a song, and after they memorized it, they taught it to groups to people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tiloukaikt</span>

Tiloukaikt was a Native American leader of the Cayuse tribe in the northwestern United States. He was involved in the Whitman Massacre and was a primary leader during the subsequent Cayuse War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narcissa Whitman</span> 19th-century American missionary

Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was an American missionary in the Oregon Country of what would become the state of Washington. On their way to found the Protestant Whitman Mission in 1836 with her husband, Marcus, near modern-day Walla Walla, Washington, she and Eliza Hart Spalding became the first documented European-American women to cross the Rocky Mountains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Norbert Blanchet</span>

François Norbert Blanchet was a French Canadian-born missionary priest and prelate of the Catholic Church who was instrumental in establishing the Catholic Church presence in the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first Catholic priests to arrive in what was then known as the Oregon Country and subsequently became the first bishop and archbishop of the Archdiocese of Oregon City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sager orphans</span>

The Sager orphans were the children of Henry and Naomi Sager. In April 1844 the Sager family took part in the great westward migration and started their journey along the Oregon Trail. During it, both Henry and Naomi died and left their seven children orphaned. Later adopted by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, missionaries in what is now Washington, they were orphaned a second time, when both their new parents, as well as brothers John and Francis Sager, were killed during the Whitman massacre in November 1847. About 1860 Catherine, the oldest daughter, wrote a first-hand account of their journey across the plains and their life with the Whitmans. Today it is regarded as one of the most authentic accounts of the American westward migration.

The Methodist Mission was the Methodist Episcopal Church's 19th-century conversion efforts in the Pacific Northwest. Local Indigenous cultures were introduced to western culture and Christianity. Superintendent Jason Lee was the principal leader for almost a decade. It was a political and religious effort. Two years after the mission began, the church's Board of Foreign Missions described its intent to reclaim "these wandering savages, who are in a very degraded state, to the blessings of Christianity and civilized life." Alongside the missions founded in the region were several secular operations opened. These were maintained to allow for material independence from the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), then the preeminent economic entity in the region among European descendants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augustin-Magloire Blanchet</span> French Canadian prelate

Augustin Magloire Alexandre Blanchet was a French Canadian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as the first bishop of the now-defunct Diocese of Walla Walla and of the Diocese of Nesqually in present-day Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tshimakain Mission</span>

Pierre Chrysologue Pambrun was a French Canadian militia officer and later a fur trader in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. Pambrun fought against the United States in the War of 1812, in particular the Battle of the Châteauguay. He joined the HBC during a time of turmoil with its competitors, the North West Company. After the Battle of Seven Oaks, he was among those held captive by men employed by the NWC.

Tom Hill (1811–1860) was a Lenape mountain man active in the American frontier. He first became prominent in the service of Kit Carson as a fur trapper during the 1830s. After that, he lived among the Nimíipuu, influencing them to mistrust ABCFM missionaries. Throughout 1847, Hill was In Alta California fighting in the service of John C. Frémont. Tom Hill returned to Kansas in 1854 to live among fellow Lenape, where he died in 1860. Several later historians have named Hill as the primary cause of the Whitman Massacre, earning him some notoriety.

The history of Walla Walla, Washington begins with the settling of Oregon Country, Fort Nez Percés, the Whitman Mission and Walla Walla County, Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Augusta Dix Gray</span>

Mary A(u)gusta Dix Gray or Mrs William H Gray was an early American missionary to Nez Perce people in the Oregon Territory in 1838. She was one of the first six European American women to cross the Rocky Mountains on what would become the Oregon Trail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asa Bowen Smith</span> American Congregational missionary

Asa Bowen Smith, also known as A.B. Smith, was a Congregational missionary posted in Oregon Country and Hawaii with his wife Sarah Gilbert White Smith. In 1840, Smith wrote the manuscript for the book Grammar of the Language of the Nez Perces Indians Formerly of Oregon, U.S.. He conducted the first census of the Nez Perce. After eight years as a missionary, he returned to the Northeastern United States where he was a pastor of the Buckland Congregational Church in Massachusetts and of the Congregational Church in Southbury, Connecticut.

The Cayuse Five were five members of the Native American tribe, the Cayuse of Oregon who were hanged for murder, in 1850. Their names were Clokomas, Isiaasheluckas, Kiamasumkin, Telakite, and Tomahas—note how these names are spelled varies.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Jones, Nard. The Great Command: the story of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Oregon country pioneers. Little, Brown and Co, 1959
  2. 1 2 Jessett, Thomas E. (1953). "The Church of England in the Old Oregon Country". Church History. 22: 219–226. doi:10.2307/3161862. JSTOR   3161862. S2CID   162883065.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Loewenberg, Robert. Equality on the Oregon Frontier: Jason Lee and the Methodist Mission 1834-43. University of Washington Press, 1976
  4. 1 2 3 4 Drury, Clifford M. (1973). Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon. Vol. 1, 2. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company. ISBN   9780870621048. OCLC   924813291.
  5. ↑ Drury, Clifford M. (1961). "The First White Women over the Rockies". Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1943-1961). 39 (1). vol 39, no 1, pp 1–13. JSTOR   23325270 . Retrieved 2021-02-19.
  6. 1 2 Furtwangler, Albert (2005). Bringing Indians to the Book.
  7. 1 2 3 Killen, Patricia O'Connell (2000). "Writing the Pacific Northwest into Canadian and U.S. Catholic History: Geography, Demographics, and Regional Religion". Historical Studies. 66.
  8. 1 2 Kris A White and Janice St. Laurent, “Collections: Mysterious Journey: The Catholic Ladder of 1840,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 97, no. 1 (1996): 72–74
  9. ↑ Gerald McKevitt, “Northwest Indian Evangelization by European Jesuits, 1841-1909,” The Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2005): 688–91.
  10. 1 2 Norwood, Frederick. “Two contrasting views of the Indians: Methodist involvement in the Indian troubles in Oregon and Washington.” Church History, vol 49, no. 2, 1980
  11. ↑ Cook, S.F. “The Epidemic of 1830-1833 in California and Oregon” ‘ ‘The Emergent Native Americans: A reader in culture contact’ ‘ ed. Deward Walker, Jr. Little, Brown and Co. 1972. pg 172-192
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.