"I came to you," one of them is reported to have said to Clark when at last they reached St. Louis, "over a trail of many moons from the setting sun. You were the friend of my fathers, who have all gone the long way. I came with one eye partly open, for more light for my people who sit in darkness.... I am going back the long, sad trail to my people of the dark land. You make my feet heavy with burdens of gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, but 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 on the long path to the other hunting ground. No white men will go with them and no white man's Book to make the way plain." Two of the four Indians died in St. Louis, and the surviving two went West in the same caravan with George Catlin, the famous portrait painter, who included their portraits, it is said, in his collection,--Numbers 207 and 209 in the Catlin Collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The first missionary effort in the Far West was put forth by the Methodist General Conference, which sent the Rev. Jason Lee westward, starting overland from Fort Independence in April, 1834. The mission was located seventy miles up the Willamette River, and, singularly enough, the Nez Percés, who had sent emissaries to the "men near to God," who had the "Book from Heaven," were passed by. In the Spring of the same year the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, including then both Congregationalists and Presbyterians, became interested in the new field for explorers and in this strange call that had come ringing across the vast prairies and rugged mountains of the unknown West, as, in a previous study, we have noticed that the Moravian Brethren became interested in the call that came half a century before across the Alleghanies from the Delawares on the Muskingum. Nor was the David Zeisberger, fearless, patient, and devoted, found to be wanting in the present instance, for the call came through a channel now difficult to trace to a young man who was able to endure and dare.