Oregon missionaries
 |
Jason Lee |
The
Oregon missionaries were collectively the religious-minded pioneers who settled in the
Oregon Country of
North America starting in the
1830s with the intent of coverting local
Native Americans to
Christianity. Such missionaries had an enormous influence on the early settlement of the region, establishing institutions that became the foundation of
United States settlement of the
Pacific Northwest.
In 1834,
New York Methodist minister
Jason Lee came to the Oregon Country as the first of these missionaries. 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. The party set out on April 28, 1834 with the
fur caravan of Captain
William Sublette, which included naturalists
John Kirk Townsend and
Thomas Nuttall. Lee built a mission school for Indians in the
Willamette Valley at the site present-day
Salem, Oregon. The school later became
Willamette University, the oldest university on the West Coast.
In 1836, four
Presbyterian ministers missionaries came to the Oregon Country to start another mission. This group was made up of
Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and her husband
Marcus Whitman, a doctor, who were both from New York. Another couple, Henry Harmon Spalding (who had been jilted by Narcissa) and his wife Eliza were also part of the group. Narcissa and Eliza were the first white women to cross the
Rocky Mountains.
The Whitmans reached the
Walla Walla River on
September 1,
1836 and found a mission to the
Cayuse Indians at
Waiilatpu in the Walla Walla Valley. The Spaldings found a mission to the
Nez Percé Indians at
Lapwai in present-day
Idaho.
The success in coverting 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 disease, which they blamed on the presence of the missionaries.
