abandoned. In the same vessel sailed Mr Whitcomb and family of the Willamette mission, his health being so broken that it was doubtful if he would live to finish the voyage.
At the Dalles, Lee, Brewer, and Mrs Perkins continued to labor at mission work and farming for three years after the arrival of the great reënforcement; but in August 1843, Daniel Lee with his wife went east in the same vessel with Frost. At the same time Dr Babcock dissolved his connection with the Mission, and went with his family on a voyage to the Hawaiian Islands. Toward the close of the summer of 1844 Perkins, after Shepard the most faithful missionary of the Methodists in Oregon, also returned to the United States, and the station at the Dalles, now no longer by any construction worthy to be called a mission, was placed in charge of the Rev. A. F. Waller.
Mrs Shepard, after a year or more of widowhood, married J. L. Whitcomb, superintendent of the mission farms, a worthy man. Mrs Leslie, who had had two daughters since her arrival in the country, lingered in a feeble condition until February 1841, when she died, leaving to her husband the care of five girls, the oldest of whom was fourteen. Had the missionaries been as well acquainted with the needs of their bodies as they were with those of their souls, it would have been better for themselves, their families, and their undertakings altogether. But they knew no more of hygiene, and its influence on the human spirits, than most other excellent people of the same day and cultivation, and they suffered accordingly.
Let us now return to the parent Mission, and follow its fortune from the year 1840. It was soon evident to the mind of Jason Lee that a better locality than French Prairie, for both missionary and colonization purposes, might be found. The French Canadians still owed allegiance to Fort Vancouver. A society of
