Of the more than forty students who attended during the first two years, over half became ill or ran away. Still, he extended the mission and built a school for Native children in 1835. The mission was one of few non-Native settlements in the valley, and Lee struggled with loneliness, illness, and frustration with his mostly failed attempts to convert the Indians. Lee’s diary indicates that he was apprehensive about ministering to the Indians in the north, who were reportedly combative, and so was ready to accept McLoughlin’s suggestion of a more southerly location.īy November, Jason and Daniel Lee had built a mission house. John McLoughlin met the members of the Wyeth company when they arrived at Fort Vancouver and, by his own account, guided Lee up the Willamette River to show him the site the chief factor had handpicked for the mission-an area along the southern edge of French Prairie, about ten miles northwest of present-day Salem. Lee's party arrived at the Columbia River five months later and stepped ashore at Fort Vancouver on September 15, 1834. Their form is so similar that we almost fancy we have seen them before." But to us who have seen nothing but mountains so long with scarcely a valley intervening there is little to excite interest. For some days we have been almost constantly surrounded with mountains.They would appear very beautiful to one who had never before seen the like. One year is elapsed and I have not yet reached the field of my labours.”Ī few days later on August 22 he wrote: “The monotony of this journey is indeed wearisome to mind and body. On August 19, 1834, he wrote: “I turned my back upon them and hurried me away and for what? For riches for honour for ease for pleasure for power for fame in fine was it for anything the world calls good and great? O Thou searcher of hearts Thou knowest. Lee’s diary details the long trip, including the obstacles the travelers faced and the people they met.Īt times, Lee described the emotional toll of the journey. Following a fundraising tour of the East Coast, Lee and his traveling companions, including his nephew Daniel Lee, left Missouri in April 1834 in a group led by Capt. In 1833, he accepted the call to Oregon Country. He taught at the academy in 1830-1831 and became a traveling preacher in the region in 1832. Born in Stanshead, Quebec, in 1803, he attended the Wilbraham Academy (Massachusetts) in 1829. Lee's journey to the West began in Canada. And, indeed, such is my aversion to writing that when my time is chiefly occupied in worldly business, and in manual labour (as has been the case the three past years) it is even a burden to sit down to write a letter on business, or answer one of a friend." ![]() Hence I have kept no journal except while crossing the Rocky Mountains. Indeed I have written exceedingly little during my life, except what I have been impelled to write by the imperious hand of duty. "It is now nearly three years since I have kept any record of the dealings of God with me, or of the events that have transpired around me. There is a significant time gap in the middle of the diary, between Sunday, November 9, 1834, and August 18, 1837, when he wrote: Lee’s diary begins on August 19, 1833, the day he left for Oregon Country. Historian Frances Fuller Victor described Lee in The History of Oregon (1886): “tall and powerfully built, slightly stooping, and rather slow and awkward in his movements of light complexion, thin lips closely shut, prominent nose, and rather massive jaws eyes of superlative spiritualistic blue high, retreating forehead, carrying mind within somewhat long hair pushed back, and giving to the not too stern but positively marked features of a slightly Puritanical aspect and withal a stomach like that of an ostrich, which could digest anything.” ![]() In 1833, Lee was assigned to minister to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. The Methodist Episcopal Church had reason to believe that its missionary efforts would be successful in the West non-Native fur trappers and explorers, including Captains William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, had reported that Indians had been curious about the power of “the white man’s book of heaven.” Like all of the missionaries who made the long and perilous journey, Lee was determined to convert the Native people in the region to Christianity. Jason Lee (1803-1845), one of the first Methodist missionaries to travel on the Oregon Trail and settle in Oregon Country.
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