of the Hudson's Bay Company in London were asked passage for two priests to Oregon by the company's annual express from Montreal, the object being to establish a Catholic mission in the Willamette Valley. The company would grant the request on one condition, namely, that the proposed mission should be established in the Cowlitz Valley, the reason given, being that the sovereignty of the British north of the Columbia was unquestioned, while the right to the country south of the Columbia was still undecided.[1]
No objection being made to this requirement, the archbishop of Quebec appointed the Rev. Francis Norbert Blanchet, then curé des Cédres, Montreal district, to the charge of the Oregon Mission, with the title of vicar-general, and for his assistant gave him the Rev. Modeste Demers of the district of Juliopolis. They left Montreal in May 1838, with the company's express, which also had a number of other travellers under its protection. All went well till the Little Dalles, on the Columbia, was reached. While the party were descending these dangerous rapids one of the boats was wrecked and nearly half the company were drowned.[2]
At Fort Colville the priests were received with the same demonstrations of pleasure that had given encouragement to the Protestant missionaries in eastern Oregon on their first appearance. During a stay of four days nineteen persons were baptized, mass was said, and the natives appeared to take great interest in the sacred rites.[3] At Fort Okanagan they met
- ↑ Simpson's Letter, in Blanchet's Hist. Cath. Ch. in Or., 24–5. Simpson of course knew that the country north of the Columbia was still in dispute, but he probably believed that the British had a better chance of eventually getting it than the southern territory. Hence his desire to strengthen the claim by inducing the Canadians to settle north of the river.
- ↑ Those drowned were: Wallace and wife, English tourists; Banks, a botanist, and his wife, a daughter of Sir George Simpson; Mrs. Williams; two little girls named Tremblay, and five others. Tod's New Caledonia, MS., 45–6; Lee and Frost's Or., 215; Cariboo Sentinel, ii. no. 12, 3; Portland Oregonian, April 19, 1879; Blanchet's Cath. Ch. in Or., 32–3.
- ↑ Blanchet's Cath. Ch. in Or., 35. Afterward Demers wrote: Experience has taught us not to rely too much on the first demonstrations of the Indians, and not to rely much on the first dispositions they manifest. Id., 102.
