"My people sent me to get the "White Man's Book of Heaven." You took me to where you allow your women to dance as we do not ours, and the book was not there. You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit with candles and the book was not there. You showed me images of the good spirits and the pictures of the good land beyond, but the book was not among them to tell us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail to my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy with gifts and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, yet the book is not among them. When I tell my poor blind people after one more snow, in the big council, that I did not bring the book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go a long path to other hunting grounds. No white man will go with them, and no White Man's Book to make the way plain. I have no more words." When this speech was translated and sent East it was published in the Christian Advocate in March, 1833, with a ringing editorial from President Fisk of Wilbraham College. "Who will respond to go beyond the Rocky Mountains and carry the Book of Heaven?" It made a profound impression. It was a Macedonian cry of "Come over and help us," not to be resisted. Old men and women who read this call, and attended the meetings at that time, are still living, and can attest to its power. It stirred the church as it has seldom been stirred into activity. This incident of the appearance in St. Louis and demand of the four Flathead Indians has been so fully verified in history as to need no additional proof to silence modern sceptics who have ridiculed it. All the earlier histories such as "Gray's History of Oregon," "Reed's Mission of the Methodist Church," Governor Simpson's narrative, Barrow's "Oregon," Parkman's "Oregon Trail," with the correspondence of the Lees, verified the truth of the occurrence. Bancroft, in his thirty-eight-volume history, in volume 1, page 579, says, "Hearing of the Christians and how heaven favors them, four Flathead Indian chiefs, in 1832, went to St. Louis and asked for teachers," etc. As this latter testimony is from a source which discredited missionary work, as we shall show in another chapter, it is good testimony upon the point. Some modern doubters have also ridiculed the speech reported to have been made by the Indian chief. Those who know Indians best will bear testimony to its genuineness. Almost every tribe of Indians has its orator and story-teller, and some of them as famous in their way as the Beechers and Phillipses and Depews, among the whites, or the Douglasses and Langstons among the negroes.