established in 1845, proclaimed as a territory in 1849 and admitted to the Union in 1859. Only in 1847 did the first steamer enter San Francisco bay. California was ceded to the United States in 1848 and admitted in 1850. Washington was organized as a territory in 1853 and became a state as late as 1889. Vancouver Island was constituted a British colony only in 1849.
The high character and quality of the tide of immigration to this Northwest in the thirties and forties is evidenced by their early interest in education and religion.
The building of schools and churches seemed to them to be one of the first necessities for the establishment of a permanent and desirable social structure in this new land of promise.
Many of the leaders came from that part of the East which gave us our free public school system and where the Christian College was the dominant type of the higher schools of learning.
They stopped not to question the necessity of such schools here. The first school teacher west of the Rockies was John Ball, who opened a school at Vancouver in 1832 with 25 half-breed children.
The first school south of the Columbia was the Mission school near old Champoeg, taught by Philip L. Edwards in 1835. Then comes that heroic pioneer Methodist missionary, Rev. Jason Lee, whose mission, as often has been the case, was to found schools as well as churches; and in 1842 the Oregon Institute at Chemeketa or North Salem, was begun primarily as a school for Indian children though the school was not formally opened till 1844. Out of this grew in time Willamette University, which received its college charter from the Territorial Legislature in 1853, just one year before Pacific University received its charter.
Pacific University, too, like many of the best educational institutions of our land, had its origin in a missionary enterprise. It was truly the child of missions in that its foundation
