great incidents and facts on which that civilization was built.

The authorities consulted, the documents read, and the opinions studied in the preparation of this work have been so numerous that the author cannot attempt to enumerate them. It is proper, however, that he say that the original journals, letters, and other manuscripts of Jason Lee, together with many letters of Daniel Lee and Cyrus Shepard, the three men who were by two years the first representatives of American Christianity and civilization west of the Rocky Mountains, have thrown much light on portions of the history of Oregon from 1834 to 1844 that could never have been had elsewhere, and to them he is greatly indebted.

With gratitude to a gracious God for the years and strength necessary to complete this labor of love just when the Great Pacific Northwest is entering an epoch of development and expansion such as it has never known before, but which could never have come to it without that which came before it, the author submits this record of the life, labors and achievements of those true Pioneers of the splendid Christian civilization of to-day to the kindly and gracious appreciation of the generation which has entered so happily into the inheritance

those departed heroes won for them out of the wil

derness by the western seas, feeling that

"Bliss was it at this dawn to be alive,

But to be young were very heaven."

H. K. HINES.

Portland, Oregon, February, 1899.

Dedication.

To the Pioneer Ministry of the Pacific Northwest with most of whom it has been his happiness and hoyor to be associated for nearly

Fifty Years

in those labors that for Heroism, Devotion and great results have had few parallels in the History of the Church,

This Volume

is affectionately dedicated by

THE AUTHOR.

I.

W

PRELIMINARY.

THE OLD OREGON.

"Where rolls the Oregon,

And hears no sound save his own dashings."

-THANATOPSIS.

HEN Bryant, in 1817, almost before the dew

of his youth had dropped from his eyelids, wrote the words the reader has just perused, Oregon was a myth, a fable, a mystery. The name itself had owned a place in geographical nomenclature less than half a century. Its origin, derivation, or meaning, was unknown. It simply lay, an almost meaningless cognomen over a vast stretch of unhistoried country west of the "Stony Mountains," and reaching to the tides of the great ocean whose watery waves themselves were only marked as yet by the wayward keels of adventurous discoverers whose weird and romancing narrations had only served to make the country more shadowy. and the seas and mountains that girted it more gloomy and defiant.

Hemmed in on the one hand by mountains tipped with the clouds of the sky, white with the