tribes of eastern Oregon, assured the Cayuses that the Americans were causing them to die. This statement, which was the beginning of a controversy not yet ended between the Protestants and Catholics, he made on the word of a Cayuse chief named Tintinmitsi, who, however, professed not to believe the accusation.[1] The mere intimation of such atrocity exposes the hearts of those who made them. The labors of Archbishop Blanchet in Canada, before spoken of, had resulted in the appointment of his brother, A. M. A. Blanchet, bishop of Walla Walla, who thereupon proceeded overland to Oregon, accompanied by nine persons, four fathers of the order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, with two lay brothers; two secular priests, Brouillet and Rosseau; and Guillaume Leclaire, a deacon.[2] After remaining at Walla Walla about a month, the Oblate fathers departed to establish a mission among the Yakimas in the Simcoe Valley; but it was not until the 27th of October that Blanchet and Brouillet, with Leclaire, removed from the fort to the camp of the Cayuse chief Tauitau, on the Umatilla River, about thirty miles distant, the chief having relinquished a house built for himself several years previous by Pambrun, in an attempt to civilize the Cayuses.
The establishment of this mission among the Cayuses, already so turbulent, and from their present temper so dangerous, was a sore trial to the Protestant missionaries, while it was, without doubt, an incentive to Dr Whitman to endeavor to remain. The pain and uneasiness the bishop was inflicting was not by any means unknown to him;[3] but whether in Catholic or Protestant, religious zeal knows no mercy,
- ↑ Oregon American, July 1848.
- ↑ None of these priests were Jesuits, though Gray and Spalding speak of them uniformly as belonging to that order.
- ↑ 'The arrival of the bishop of Walla Walla,' says Archbishop Blanchet, 'with his clergy to the fort was a thunderbolt to the Presbyterian ministers, specially to Dr Whitman. He was wounded to the heart by it. He could not refrain from expressing his dissatisfaction, saying he would do all in his power to thwart the bishop.' Hist. Cath. Church in Or., 163–5.
