Dr. John McLoughlin, the Father of OregonHolman, Frederick V.
History
Dr. John McLoughlin, the Father of Oregon
Holman, Frederick V.
McLoughlin, John, 1784-1857; Oregon Territory -- History
On arriving in the Eastern States in 1838 Rev. Jason Lee seems to have
become imbued with the zeal and fervor of an evangelist in regard to
christianizing the Oregon Indians, and the necessity of more
missionaries in Oregon. Rev. Dr. Hines in his _Missionary History of the
Pacific Northwest_, p. 194, says: "Mr. Lee devoted the winter of 1838
and the summer of 1839 to traveling and delivering missionary addresses
in the cities and larger towns of the Atlantic states. He was
accompanied in his journeys by the two Indian boys, Wm. Brooks and
Thomas Adams, brought with him from his missionary school in Oregon,
whose presence and intelligent speeches added greatly to the popular
enthusiasm. Lee's appeals were irresistible. The fire of his zeal caught
on the altars of the church everywhere. Oregon and the Oregon Mission
fired the heart of the church as no mission ever did before. The age of
apostolic fervor seemed to have returned, and Lee was in the eye of the
church like the great Apostle to the Gentiles building on no other man's
foundation. The thought of distant wilds, where uncounted red men waited
and longed for deliverance from the darkness of heathenism that had
wrapped all their race for all these ages became an ever present vision
to the church of the United States." In this _History_, p. 195, Dr.
Hines also says: "Poverty donated its little; wealth gave its 'gold,
frankincense, and myrrh.'... The culture of Boston responded; the pride
of New York cast its jewels into the treasury. The staid sobriety of
Philadelphia wept and shouted and gave. Baltimore out-did the renown of
her ancient missionary fame. Lee, erst the lumberman of Canada, later
the pioneer missionary, who had dipped his banner in the spray of the
Pacific was the hero of the hour." But in his oral report to the
Missionary Board in July, 1844, after quoting the following from the
letter of a complaining fellow missionary who went to Oregon on the
Lausanne: "And indeed they [the Indians] have no life or energy and are
a melancholy, doomed race," Jason Lee said: "I think this is in part
true, the Indians on the Willamette will become, as a distinct race,
extinct. But I think there will be more Indian blood through
amalgamation, running in the veins of white men a hundred years hence,
than would have been running in the veins of the Indians, if they had
been left to themselves."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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