Foundation
See also: Oregon MissionIn 1831, several Nez Perce Indians were said to have traveled to St. Louis, Missouri and met with General William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to inquire about the “white man’s God” from the General. This spurred a missionary movement to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. In 1834 the Methodist Church sent the Reverend Jason Lee, his nephew the Reverend Daniel Lee, Cyrus Shepard, Philip Leget Edwards, and Courtney M. Walker overland to preach to the Flathead Indians (Salish). The group contracted with the entrepreneur Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth to travel overland with his party and to ship supplies around Cape Horn on Wyeth’s ship May Dacre.
Lee ignored the missionary board’s instructions and traveled to Oregon Country, where he set up a mission in the Willamette Valley. John McLoughlin, district director of the Hudson’s Bay Company recommended the Willamette Valley as a better spot for settlement than the area to the north where the Flathead lived. The mission was 60 miles up the Willamette River from its junction with the Columbia. The mission built a cabin, barn, and fencing before the first winter set in.
Read more about this topic: Methodist Mission
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“Laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)