elsewhere shown, a catholic mission was maintained there afterward for some years.
From the sale[1] and abandonment of the Dalles mission to June 1850 there was no protestant mission at that place; but subsequent to the passage of the donation law, and notwithstanding the military reservation of the previous month of May, an attempt was made to revive the methodist claim in that year by surveying and making a claim which took in the old mission site; and in 1854 their agent, Thomas H. Pearne, notified the surveyor general of the fact.[2] In the interim, however, a town had grown up at this place, and certain private individuals and the town officers opposed the pretensions of the methodists. And it would seem from the action of the military authorities at an earlier date that either they differed from the methodist society as to their rights, or were willing to give them an opportunity to recover damages for the appropriation of their property, the former mission premises being located about in the centre of the reservation.
When the amended land law in 1853 reduced the military reservations in Oregon to a mile square, the reserve as laid out still took something more than half of the claim as surveyed by the methodists in 1850.[3] For this the society, by its agent, brought a
- ↑ The price paid by Whitman for the improvements at The Dalles was, according to the testimony of the methodist claimants, $600 in a draft on the American board, the agreement being cancelled in 1849 by a surrender of the draft.
- ↑ The superintendent of the M. E. mission, William Roberts, advertised in the Spectator of Jan. 10, 1850, that he designed to reoccupy the place, declaring that the society had only withdrawn from it for fear of the Indians, though every one could know that when the mission was sold the war had not yet broken out. The Indians were, however, ill-tempered and defiant, as I have related. See Fulton's Eastern Oregon, MS., 8.
- ↑ Fulton describes the boundaries as follows: 'When the government reduced the military reservations to a mile square, it happened that, on surveying the land so as to bring the fort in the proper position with regard to the boundaries, a strip of land was left nearly a quarter of a mile in width next the river, which was not covered by the reserve. To this strip of land the mission returned, upon the pretence that as it was not included in the military reservation, for which they had received $24,000, it was still theirs. In addition to the river front, there was also a strip of land on the east side of the reserve which was brought by the government survey within the section that
