Before the cart stood the four barefoot girls in their tattered dresses. Afraid of the unknown, they huddled speechlessly, first looking at Mrs. Whitman then at one another, not knowing what to expect. John, the older boy, still sat in the cart. Exhausted but relieved, he bent his head to his knees and sobbed aloud. His brother, Francis, leaned on a wheel and also began to cry. Dr. Dagan, who had been both father and mother to the orphans, stood to one side and, filled with emotion, watched Narcissa murmur a compassionate welcome. She then took the children into the mission house. [Illustration: An Indian woman made this doll for young Elizabeth Sager.] At that time Narcissa’s health was not good, and she and Marcus debated that evening whether or not to take all seven orphans into their family. But the plight of the children resolved all doubts. The Whitmans now found themselves directly responsible for a family of 11 children. In addition to this family, the children of the emigrant families stopped at the mission each autumn and often stayed for the winter. Also present were the children whom the Whitmans took into their school as boarders—such as the young lady whom Dr. Whitman had brought into the world, Eliza Spalding—and the two Manson boys, the half-breed sons of a Hudson’s Bay employee at Fort Walla Walla. Thus, following the death of Alice Clarissa, there was always a large number of youthful voices at Waiilatpu, as indeed there was, to a lesser degree, at the other missions. _Missions in Oregon_ During the 11 years they operated in Oregon, the American Board stations continually sent home requests for lay assistants to help convert the Indian tribes. Despite these pleas, no additional reinforcements were sent to Oregon after 1838. On the contrary, the mission stations were reduced from four to three. Discouraged, lonely, and increasingly concerned over his wife’s health, Asa Smith left Kamiah in 1841 and sailed for the Hawaiian Islands. From then until 1847 only Waiilatpu, Lapwai, and Tshimakain remained in operation. In western Oregon the Methodist missions, established with the arrival of Jason Lee in 1834, were suffering difficulties of their own. Faced with a rapidly diminishing number of Indians, the Methodists began to concentrate in the early 1840’s on establishing churches among the new white settlements that were rapidly filling the Willamette Valley. In 1847 the Methodists offered to sell their remaining Indian mission, Waskopum at The Dalles, to the American Board. Whitman, worried that Catholic missionaries would take over the area if the American Board did not, agreed to purchase it. Lacking a missionary to send there, he hired Alanson Hinman and his wife, from the Willamette Valley, to take charge of secular affairs and sent his nephew, Perrin, to live with them.