Besides this, there were frequent cases of intermittent fever. Soon the house became a hospital, in which sixteen children were lying ill in one small room. No physician being at hand, the younger Lee applied his poor skill, assisted by the ever-patient and truly devoted Shepard, whose part in the Mission labors was most trying. Jason Lee himself had not escaped the prevailing sickness. It is not always the virtuous that the oak shrub will not poison, nor the fair whom the mosquitoes refuse to bite. He was at Fort Vancouver for medical aid when his nephew arrived. Lucy Hedding, the Calapooya girl, was also there, though past relief, for she died on the 5th of October. Edwards afterward took another patient to Fort Vancouver; and in November Jason Lee, suffering from his third attack, once more resorted to the superior practice of Doctor McLoughlin, remaining with him five weeks.
The fact that only two had died and one deserted greatly encouraged the Mission superintendent this year. The sum of spiritual benefits received as an offset to the physical penalties paid for religious instruction appears to have been this: Joseph Pournaffe, a half-breed, seventeen years of age, of gentle and obedient temper, gave evidence to his teachers that their labors were not lost, by dying with the same docility that he had shown during life.[1] Probably there never was formulated a creed which might be adapted to the purpose with less friction than that of the Methodists. No expounding of dogmas is necessary; sufficient is the simple statement that sin is present, and that Christ's blood will wash it away. To the Indian, who had some idea of atonement, the
- ↑ Lee and Frosts' Or., 142; Hines' Or. Hist., 18.
brane either forms or is sloughed off. Lee's own throat was affected with that sloughing off when he went to the Islands. There would seem to be evidence that this character of throat disease is due to malaria, or miasmatic conditions of the atmosphere; and it is a fact that the scourge of diphtheria is even now more dreaded, because more fatal, than any other in the rich valley lands of Oregon, and also that it breaks out in newly ploughed districts where it was never known before, as, for example, where pasture-lands are turned into grain-fields.
