and an inquiry was to be instituted into the financial affairs of the Mission in Oregon.[1]
When Lee left Oregon it was with the intention of waiting at the Islands for a vessel going to New York or Boston, and with the expectation that Mr and Mrs Hines and his little daughter would accompany him. He had been superintendent for ten years, and just at the time when the position seemed most important to him he was to be deposed. For a while he was staggered, but after the first revulsion of feeling he determined to make at least a protest. After consultation with Hines and Babcock, it was settled that they should return at the earliest opportunity to Oregon, and do what they could in his interests there. Without waiting for an American vessel, and leaving his child, he hastened on to New York by the Hawaiian schooner Hoa Tita, for Mazatlan, and thence proceeded to Vera Cruz and to his destination.
In the work of colonization the way was oftentimes difficult, and seemed at times exceedingly slow, yet he could not but feel that though the soft air bites the granite never so gently, the rock will crumble beneath constant effort.
He felt uneasy at the thought of meeting his brethren. Surely there were enough redskins in the west who knew not God. What should he say to those who had sent him forth, when they should ask why he had not converted the heathen? Though he might wrap himself in a newly slain bullock's hide, after the manner of the Scotchman, and lie down beside a water-fall or at the foot of a precipice, and there meditate until the thoughts engendered by the wild surroundings should become inspiration, yet could he not fathom the mystery why God's creatures, whom he had been sent by God to instruct, should wither and die at his touch!
- ↑ Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Managers of the Missionary Society of the M. E. Church, in White's Ten Years in Or., 132. Sec also Hines' Oregon Hist., 235–7.
