and at Coeur d'Alene. But others who followed and supported him carried the work throughout most of the interior country.
Religious rivalries. Two widely variant types of Christianity were thus presented to the Indians of the Northwest by men who in each case conceived his own form to be the only means of salvation. It is not strange that the Indians were puzzled, or that vengeful feelings should occasionally cause those of one faith to injure the teachers of the other. So general was the impression of hostility among the rival groups of religionists that when the Whitman massacre occurred, in November, 1847, the adherents of the Protestant cause were impelled to lay the blame for the awful crime upon the Catholics who, they believed, had incited the Indians to murder the Protestant missionaries. This charge, in support of which no real evidence has ever been produced, springs naturally out of the religious rancour of the time.
