bought from Smith with the understanding that the Yankee should
thenceforth stay out of Oregon.
Nathaniel J. Wyeth of Boston came to the Columbia in 1832 with the intention of starting a salmon fishery and packing plant. After returning to the east coast in 1833, he came again to the Oregon country in 1834 and established Fort William on Sauvie Island. With Wyeth's second company were the Methodist clergyman Jason Lee and his nephew Daniel Lee, the first of many missionaries to come to the Northwest. They proposed to educate and Christianize the Indians, and for this purpose they established in 1835 a Methodist mission station and school in the Willamette Valley. The School was taken over in 1844 by the Oregon Institute (now Willamette University), organized in 1842. Other missionaries arrived, among them Dr. Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding in 1836.
Until early in the 1840*8 there was no local government in the Ore gon territory except that of the Hudson's Bay Company which exer cised feudal rights derived from the British Crown. McLoughlin en joyed the protection of British laws in the conduct of his company's affairs, but Americans in the territory were for the most part ignored by successive administrations at Washington. However, the missionaries formulated regulations for themselves as well as for the Indians over whom they assumed charge, and their leadership was accepted in a large measure by the independent American settlers.
The Lees were discouraged by the indifference of the Indians to religious salvation, but in letters to friends in the East they extolled the wild western country, thus supplementing the publicity given to the territory by Hall J. Kelley, a Boston schoolmaster who was one of the first propagandists for Oregon. Jason Lee, on the first of two trips to the Atlantic coast, presented a memorial to Congress asking for the Government's protection of its citizens in Oregon. Meanwhile, American settlers were finding their way into the Willamette Valley. The "Peoria Party" came in 1839, a few more arrived in 1840, and about 40 adults and children in 1841. In 1842 Whitman made a difficult winter ride across the Continent on missionary matters and also to enlist homeseekers and invoke governmental aid in the settlement of the Oregon country. That year a larger immigration came across the plains, and in 1843 the first considerable wagon train made the long and trying journey over the Oregon Trail. Thenceforward the population rapidly and steadily increased.
Despite his misgivings concerning the effect of their arrival on the
