CORRESPONDENCE 287
my last chance for sending is early tomorrow morning. I can therefore do nothing more than sketch a few lines in the greatest haste. The mercies of God are still passing before us, giving us life and health as a family. We find presented almost daily opportunities of contributing to the formation of the moral character of the people of our Territory. Yet we find everything so dissimilar to anything we ever experienced that we often feel placed almost beyond religious privileges as you are wont to enjoy them in the States.
The population as yet must, from the nature of the case, be very sparse and, as the settlements are somewhat remote from each other, it renders the labors of a missionary difficult, sit- uated as we are at this time many thousands of miles from home and with exhausted funds. We cannot reasonably expect any supplies from your Board for at least twelve months. With these obstacles before us we do not despair, but must be pained while we are obliged to minister to our temporal wants temporarily, and hence limit greatly our field of labour. I have pretty nearly concluded to teach a school a few months, as soon as we get settled, as the most convenient method of promoting the moral and religious condition of the people. I have just returned from the mouth of the Columbia River. I find it an interesting part of the country, and, to all prob- ability, should the emigration continue as we have reason to anticipate, the commercial point for the Willamette Valley and a great portion of the Territory must be located either where Astoria once stood or between that and the mouth of the river. I found about thirty or forty log cabins in this vicinity occupied by families and bachelors. On the south side of the river about the mouth is a tract of rich land large enough for a small county, susceptible of cultivation, but mostly timbered. That portion now occupied is mostly plains, and portions of the timbered land would be more easily cleared and put under cultivation than most of the timbered land in New York. 103 The climate is remarkably salubrious. Noth-
103 The history of Astoria is too well known to need repetition here. The Clatsop Plains were apparently first settled by whites in 1840 when the Methodist Mission established a station there. Bancroft, Hist, of Ore. I .'185.
This station was ordered sold out in 1844. Ibid. I:22i.
