For more than three decades after the destruction of the _Tonquin_ there were no serious Indian conflicts. The Hudson's Bay Company carried out consistently the general policy of harmony with the natives. Most of the employees were of French Canadian origin, and, with their general sociability, they were more popular with the Indians than the Americans usually have been. But with the incoming of American missionaries, trappers, explorers, and immigrants, the situation changed. Conflicts of interests, ambitions, and national aims led both Americans and British to be somewhat more ready to encourage the hostile and suspicious disposition of the natives. Chiefly, however, the cause of the changing attitude of the natives must be attributed to the perception by the more intelligent of the fact that the actual occupation of the country by white farmers, home builders, and land owners, meant their own destruction. Though this truth dawned on them only vaguely and gradually, they had begun to be somewhat familiar with it by the decade of the thirties. The founding of American missions during that decade, as narrated earlier, at Chemeketa, Walla Walla, Lapwai, and Tshimakain, and, during the years following, the obvious intent of the Americans to draw immigration to the country, prepared the way for the first and perhaps the most ferocious, though by no means the greatest, of the four principal wars which we plan to consider. This first one was the war connected with the Whitman massacre. We have already described the founding of the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, six miles from the present site of Walla Walla, and twenty-six miles from the Hudson's Bay fort on the Columbia, known as Fort Walla Walla. We have also told of Whitman's journey across the continent in the mid-winter of 1842-43, of his efforts to secure the attention of Congress and of the Executive to the importance of the Oregon country, and of his return to Walla Walla in 1843, with the first large immigration of American settlers. After the incoming of this immigration, it became more than ever clear to the more intelligent Indians that this movement of settlers portended a change in their whole condition. Their wild life could not co-exist with farming, houses, and the fixed and narrowed limits of the white man's life. Moreover, since they saw the antagonism between the Americans and the Hudson's Bay Company, and since the latter was obviously more favourable to perpetuating the life of the wilderness, the natives were naturally drawn into sympathy with the latter. Still further, since the Americans were Protestants and naturally affiliated with the Whitman Mission and its associated missions, and since the Hudson's Bay people were mainly Catholics and interested in maintaining the missionary methods adapted to the regime of the fur-traders, there became injected into the situation the dangerous element of religious jealousy.