History Minutes: Missionaries

First Dwelling House in Salem, 1841 // OrHi 39916 

Beginning in the 1830s, missionaries arrived in Oregon, eager to convert Indians to Christianity and assimilate them into what they considered a “civilized” life.  Catholic missionaries tended to settle north of the Columbia, while the Methodists headed south into the Willamette Valley.  As a result, some of Oregon's oldest buildings are Methodist churches.

Missionaries sent glowing reports back home of a promised land and a limitless future. In virtually every instance, Methodist missionaries, such as Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Henry and Eliza Spalding, Jason and Daniel Lee, and others, used their influence most successfully in urging white settlement of the region.  John McLoughlin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver, was prophetic when he wrote in 1847 about why the Americans came: “It always seemed that the great influx of American missionaries and the statements of the Country these missionaries sent to their friends circulated through the United States in the public papers were the remote cause.”

It is no surprise, then, that missionaries became politically involved in the region.  Lewis Judson, Josiah Parrish, and Jason Lee were among those who were active in early efforts to form a provisional government in Oregon.  In 1838, Lee traveled to

WashingtonD.C. to petition Congress for statehood, and he presided over some of the important "Wolf Meetings" at Champoeg in 1841.  Oregon's rain often tested the resolve of the missionaries already frustrated by Native Americans' reluctance to convert. Still, most persevered. "I think," wrote missionary J.H. Frost in 1841, "if I can see the way opened, and good, spiritual good, being effected….I would rather be here in this lonely, and dreary region, than in the city full, where all the comforts and conveniences of life are to be enjoyed."