CHAPTER 4
Writings of the Missionaries
Reverend Samuel Parker: “A great number.”
Indian: “Will it be moons?
Parker: “Yes, at least two snows.”
The missionaries were enthnologists in a way, but since their ethnological efforts were part of their machinery for propaganda the results were not nearly so significant as they might have been if the spirit of investigation had dominated the spirit of evangelism. They were interested in learning the languages of the Indians in order that they might transmit the white man’s bible, not that they might find out what the Indians thought and felt, and remembered of their long history. So, like the explorers and trappers, they let the primitive Indian literature move still further towards oblivion without doing much to understand it or to set it down in writing.
Jason Lee, Daniel Lee, Cyrus Shepard, P. L. Edwards and C. M. Walker arrived at Fort Vancouver in September, 1834—the vanguard of introspective men. They had come by land. The next day, the May Dacre arrived from around Cape Horn, bringing their poetry in the form of hymn books.
When Cyrus Shepard had taught the half-breed children of the Fort to sing the songs in these books, it “excited such interest” that Dr. McLoughlin, under the guise of encouraging piety but probably motivated also by his own glad response to the lilting melodies, arranged for the children to sing in the dining hall every Sunday evening.
