oxen were loaned with which to haul timber for building, and eight cows with their calves were furnished, and one bull, in place of the two cows that had been driven from the Missouri to the Columbia River and left in the upper country.
The labor attending the driving of the cattle and of transporting the goods, which required carriage round the falls and reloading in the canoes, was considerable, and occupied several days; but by the 6th of October stock and effects were safely placed on the bank of the Willamette, ready for consecration and use.
The causes governing the selection of a site are obvious. Jason Lee was a man; although a servant of the Lord, he was already the master of men. How far the thought of empire had hitherto mingled with his missionary plans probably he himself could scarcely tell. He could not but see that human possibilities were broader, mightier, in the fertile valley of the Willamette, open through its Columbia avenue to the sea, than the inaccessible so-called Flathead country. Were he altogether missionary, and not man, he might have felt that, though the possibilities for man were here greater, with God all things are possible, and so have remained in the rock-bound region of mid-continent. But being full of human ambition as well as of human sympathy, it was not difficult to make the interests of God indentical with his own.[1]
- ↑ Daniel Lee says that in the occasion which originated the idea of the Flathead mission the claim of the Flatheads to the first missionary efforts had been overrated, and that subsequent inquiries had furnished reasons for believing they would not be justified in attempting to open their mission work among that tribe. These reasons were, the difficulties of obtaining food and of transporting building material and implements a distance of 600 miles; the small number of the Flatheads, whose perpetual wars with the Blackfoot Indians prevented their increase; the fact that the latter were as much the enemies of white men as of the neighboring tribes, and would cherish besides additional hostility toward any who should become allied with them, either white or red; and the desire the missionaries had for a larger field of usefulness than that offered by a single tribe. They took into account, he said, the wants of the whole country, present and Prospective and hoped to meet those wants in the progress of their work They chose the Willamette station as a starting-point and centre of a wide field of proposed
