shot-pouch which Lee wore about his neck, and believed it a bad medicine with which he intended to kill them all. Gagnier's wife knew this, and with her brother kept watch through the whole night, never permitting the camp-fire to go out, or her eyelids to close.[1] It was not strange that these savages should be alarmed at the shot-pouch. Like the tribes of the Columbia, they had suffered from such fatal diseases since white men came as to have been nearly swept from the earth. Hines tells us that all he could obtain knowledge of in that part of the country were no more than three hundred and seventy-five souls, and expresses his conviction that the doom of extinction is over this wretched race; and that the hand of Providence was removing them to give place to a people more worthy of so beautiful and fertile a country—a doctrine comforting to the missionary who fails to perceive its unfair reflection on Providence.
With such convictions, it was scarcely to be expected that a mission should prosper anywhere; so after a hasty exploration of the Umpqua Valley, the missionaries returned home, and the subject of a station in that quarter was dropped.[2]
Soon after his return from the Umpqua country, a misunderstanding arose between Jason Lee and Elijah White. The reason of the rupture remains somewhat of a mystery. White himself said it was an honest difference of opinion in relation to the best way of carrying on the Mission work.[3] The truth is,
- ↑ Gray, that most mendacious missionary, makes Gagnier an agent of the Hudson's Bay Company for the killing of Hines and Lee, and to render more plausible his horrible hypothesis, he twice falsely quotes from Hines.
- ↑ A newspaper at the Sandwich Islands, commenting on the secular nature of the work in the Willamette Valley, said: 'As settlers we wish them every success, but advise them to drop the missionary in their communications, nowadays.' Polynesian, Nov. 27, 1841.
- ↑ White's Ten Years in Or., 131. Parrish more pointedly ascribes it to a misappropriation of the Mission funds in Lee's absence Or. Anecdotes, MS., 108. Gray, who hated White, assigns dishonesty, treachery, libertinism, etc., as the reasons which brought about the difference. Hist. Or., 175; and Raymond accuses him of improper relations with the Indian girls of the Mission school. Notes of a Talknn, MS., 4. Wilkes says that he was told, when in Ore-
