had applied themselves chiefly to the study of languages; Father Ravalli, being skilled in medicine, rendered considerable services to the inhabitants of St. Paul's mission; Father Vercruysse, at the request of Right Reverend Bishop Blanchet, opened a mission among the Canadians who were distant from St. Paul's. Father DeVos is the only one of our Fathers of Willamette who speaks English. He devotes his whole attention to the Americans, whose number already exceeded 4,000. There are several Catholic families and our dissenting brethen seem well disposed." It was De Vos, who received into the church a year later, at Oregon City, one of the most distinguished of the Oregon pioneers. Chief Justice Peter H. Burnett, afterwards first Governor of California.
Father DeSmet went overland from St. Paul to Walla Walla, past the foot of Mt. Hood. The trail to The Dalles was strewed with whitened bones of oxen and horses, which appealed to our traveler as melancholy testimonies to the hardships which had been faced by the American immigrants during the three preceding years. He becomes enthusiastic about Hood, "with its snowy crest towering majestically upward, and losing itself in the clouds." Leaving Fort Walla Walla, Father DeSmet traversed the fertile lands of the Nez Perces and Cayuse Indians, the richest tribes in Oregon. It was among these Indians that Dr. Marcus Whitman had established a mission for the American Board, and it was here that the savage and brutal massacre of Dr. and Mrs. Whitman, in 1847, made the name of the Cayuse Indians ever infamous in Oregon annals.
Our missionary spent the feast of St. Ignatius, 1845, Kettle Falls, in the vicinity of Fort Colville, on the Columbia, where nearly a thousand savages of the Kalispel nation were engaged in salmon fishing. He had a little chapel of boughs constructed on an eminence in the midst of the Indian huts, and there he gave three instructions each day. The Indians attended faithfully at his spiritual exercises and he spent the 31st of July (St. Ignatius' Day) baptizing the savages. He
