emigrants, and labor for a time at the mission, and to the need of good men being settled, three or four in a place, to form a nucleus for religious institutions, and to hold Romanism in check.[1] The country must be occupied, he said, by Americans or foreigners; and if by the latter, they would be chiefly Catholics.
This alarm regarding the Catholics, who at the period when these apprehensions were felt had no station nearer than the Bitter Root and Willamette valleys, would appear disproportioned to the occasion, were it not that in a subsequent letter it is said there was an evident desire on the part of the natives to make use of the differences between the Protestants and Catholics for their own purposes, a danger which only those who understood Indian character could properly estimate. From the time of Whitman's return to Waiilatpu, it could not be said that there was any improvement in the moral character of the savages, though their temporal condition continued to mend chiefly through the increase in the number of those who cultivated the ground and raised cattle. As early as 1842 the Nez Percés owned thirty-two head of neat cattle, ten sheep, and forty hogs. The Cayuses owned about seventy head, chiefly cows, which they obtained from the Hudson's Bay Company, the mission of the American board, the Methodist mission, or the Willamette settlers, in exchange for horses. They had also a few sheep, earned by herding the flock belonging to the mission. The possession of cattle by their teachers had been a constant occasion of envy and of reproach by the natives, who demanded, in effect, that the missionaries should share their herds with them, instead of which they were shown how to procure them for themselves.
The advent of the immigrants produced a change for the worse in the savages for two reasons. It gave them plausible ground for declaring that the missionaries were leagued with other Americans to take
- ↑ Boston Miss. Herald, May 1844, 177.
