When the missionaries came to Oregon, the Indian that could,
"Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything,"
accepted them as ministers of the Great Spirit, keepers of the "Book of Heaven," and superior beings. He took the white man as a friend, but found him too often to be a despoiler of his wives, a trader in fire water, that robbed him of his peltries and appropriated his hunting grounds. And although the ministers of religion treated him kindly and justly as far as their personal intercourse went, they did not and could not stay the tide of immigration which over-ran the country, seized his lands and drove away the wild animals that had furnished him food and raiment. He had gained a little knowledge, but had lost his freedom in the forest and his home on the earth the Great Spirit had given him in common with all his children.
The reasoning power of the Indian was limited to what he saw or felt. The novelty of the sacred rites and mystical signs, the commands of virtue and the teachings of the missionaries were good enough as long as there were no more white men coming; no fears of being driven from the land, and no fears but that they would possess the country in the future as their fathers had in the past. They had learned from the Iroquois and the Blackfeet how the white men had swarmed into the Mississippi valley and driven the Indians back from the beautiful Ohio and the rich lands of Illinois. And it took no reasoning power to satisfy them that if the white man was not stopped from coming over the mountains to Oregon they too must give up their lands and homes, or die. They appealed directly to Whitman and other Protestant missionaries to stop the white man from coming, and were told that more and more white men would come with their wives and children, cattle and horses. They saw that the priests did not bring men to take up more farms, and for that reason were more friendly to the Catholics. They had held their councils, and resolved to kill all the whites and drive back the human tide. And if they had possessed a leader like Pontiac or Tecumseh. or like Joseph who arose as a great leader after the country was settled, they could have exterminated the white settlers, and would have done so as mercilessly as they massacred Whitman and his family.
And when they resolved to fight the white man they threw away his religion, and all his teachings of morality. And now today, seventy years after the great Indian revivals wrought by De Smet, there are fewer professed Christians among the Indians of old Oregon than ever before. But by comparison with the white man this is not much to the discredit of the Indian. The number of professing christians among the white people of Oregon today are much less in proportion to population than seventy years ago. This was practically a prohibition community seventy years ago, but now Portland has four hundred and nineteen retail liquor shops, spends thousands of dollars on prize fights, and kills a man every day or so with automobiles.
The substantial uplift of any community is a slow and tedious work; and of a race a still slower and more tedious task—a work of evolution in which a thousand seen and unseen elements of change must take part. The factors undermining the strength of the man, community or race, are innate and always at work; while the forces that demoralize, or openly oppose the development of man's faculties and the uplift of the social fabric, are always present in some form ready to be set in motion. The Rev. Elkanah Walker, who was one of the first Protestant missionaries among the Oregon Indians, and who faithfully labored for their improvement for many years, in the last sermon he preached in his life, in the little Union church at the town of Gaston, discussed this matter from his experience with both the white and red man; and summed up the whole matter in this sententious sentence: "It takes a very, very long time to make a white man out of an Indian; but the descent of the white man into an Indian is short and swift."
