Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/386

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A PRINTING-PRESS.
335

stand. After making some delay and difficulty about it, he appeared to relent, and promised to accept the horses provided Tiloukaikt, and all concerned in the assault, should go and beg pardon of the doctor, which they consented to do.[1] So again the sky was clear over Waiilatpu.

Meanwhile Spalding was having similar trouble at Lapwai. The Nez Percés pulled down his mill, claiming it to be their own, and assaulted him with a gun, Mrs Spalding herself not escaping insult. There had not been one year in the five from 1837 to 1842, in which some of these occurrences had not taken place.

Surrounded by difficulties and dangers such as these, it is no wonder that the Protestant missionaries resented the advent of the Catholics. The natives could not fail to see that there was trouble between their teachers, and their mischievous nature made them quick to take advantage of the situation. They carried stories back and forth, taking a malicious delight in exaggerating such scraps of scandal as were blown about their ears upon the breezes of religious rivalry.

While A. B. Smith was at the Kamiah mission he reduced the Nez Percé dialect to grammatical rules. In the summer of 1839 the Lapwai mission received a visit from the printer of the Honolulu mission, E. O. Hall, who brought as a present from the first native church of Honolulu a small printing-press and some type. He remained long enough to teach the printer's art to Spalding and Rogers, and on this press were printed primers in the native language for the use of the pupils, a collection of hymns, and some

  1. Tolmie's Puget Sound, MS., 24–5. I have Tolmie's authority also for the story told by several others, that Gray, to prevent the native children from taking melons out of the gardon at Waiilatpu, inserted tartar emetic into several of the finest ones in order to make the thieves sick and destroy their craving for melon. Its evil effects were quickly perceived, and the suspicion naturally engendered that the missionaries were exercising tamanowas, or evil-eye, upon them, which led to further suspicions at a later date. See also the testimony of Augustine Raymond and John Young, in Brouillet's Authentic Account, 31.