In the meantime a second mission had been established east of the Cascade Mountains. In the summer of 1836, Dr. Marcus Whitman and Mrs. Whitman, the Rev. Henry H. Spaulding and Mrs. Spaulding, and William H. Gray, under commission from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and settled among the native tribes of the Upper Columbia. The primary object of this mission, as was that of the mission to the tribes of the Willamette Valley, was the evangelization of the Indians. But this mission, unlike that, was based from the first on the family, and thus brought with it this first condition of permanence. Within its limited number were the two first American white families to settle in Oregon, and were included for a period of six months or more the only American white women dwelling west of the Rocky Mountains. From its original number, and more largely from its later reinforcements, the mission made valuable contributions to the body of permanent settlers, but perhaps its greatest contribution to the history of Oregon was one incidental to its primary work as a mission, in its showing to America and the world by its own first treading of the same, that there was an open pathway for American families through the Rocky Mountains into the valley of the Columbia. This mission thus demonstrated for the first the practical contiguity of the Oregon Territory to the United States. It was this contiguity as it was subsequently made patent that was, almost more than all else, to influence the Oregon Question to an issue favorable to the United States. Whitman seems to have seen this from the first. The settlement of the Oregon Question came to appear to him simply a matter of prior settlement of the territory from contiguous states, and such prior settlement was a question only of an open pathway through the intervening mountains. To his mind, therefore, the first duty of the American government was not in military occupation of the region in question, nor in the extension over it of civil jurisdiction, but in making the pathway thither already pointed out, a plain and safe highway for American settlers. This done, the people would do the rest.