aiming. This feeling of apprehension served, on frequent occasions, to hold the balance even or to prompt certain conciliatory measures, when there was danger of a conflict of opinion dividing the population on colonial questions, as will be more clearly illustrated in a future chapter on government affairs. In the matter of religious differences, when the Methodist Mission was dissolved, the chief cause of irritation was removed, and Protestant and Catholic labored side by side with similar if not coincident aims, and without seriously interfering with one another. It was not, therefore, in the Willamette Valley that the intrusion of another form of religion was regarded with the greatest uneasiness, but in the unsettled Indian country east of the Cascade Mountains, where a few isolated families were endeavoring to teach the first principles of progress to wilful and capricious savages, and where any interference with their labors was sure to create a division among the natives, which might destroy the effect of all their efforts.
The experience of the Presbyterian missionaries was entirely different from that of their Methodist brethren. They had to deal with tribes yet in their primitive strength of mind and body, having their intelligence not yet weakened but sharpened by contact with white men, lordly in their ideas of personal dignity, but blind to the rights of others while insisting with the utmost pertinacity upon what they esteemed their own. To teach such beings required the exercise of extraordinary tact, firmness, and patience, and would have been difficult had the savages been constantly subject to the influence of precept and example. But their roving habits took them away from their teachers during a considerable portion of the year, and although eager and quick to learn, they gave little time to study.
To overcome these difficulties the missionaries worked hard to put themselves in sympathy with their pupils, by mastering their dialects, and endeav-
