organized by him October 31, 1841. It was while living in Muscatine in 1843 that he planned to go to Oregon the following year.
Feeling that the opportunity of visiting relatives and friends would not again be theirs, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher, with their three children, spent the summer and fall of 1843 in the East. It was their first trip back since coming to the Mississippi Valley nearly eleven years before. At the end of the long journey from Iowa, their little daughter announced their arrival at the home of her grandparents in New York by exclaiming, "O grandpa, we've come to stay all night." Their youngest daughter[1] was born during the visit there.
Leaving New York late in the fall, they reached Davenport, Ia., December 15, having come all the way by team.
Under appointment of the Home Mission Society, and still expecting to go to Oregon in the spring of 1844, Ezra Fisher began preaching to various churches within reach of Davenport, travelling that quarter four hundred and twenty-eight miles.
Unfavorable reports of the immigration of 1843 soon reached him. Some of the company had returned, like the Israelitish spies of Canaan, to discourage the hearts of many anticipating the Oregon land of promise.
The uncertainty of getting beyond Fort Hall with wagons and the unsettled condition of Oregon, together with other reasons, led Ezra Fisher to defer his going to Oregon until 1845. He was therefore appointed to labor at Rock Island, Ill., and Mt. Pleasant, twelve miles southeast. On March 14, 1845, at the close of his year with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, he received his commission to labor in Oregon.
Early in April Ezra Fisher and his family set out from Rock Island, Ill., on their journey of more than twenty-five hundred miles, to the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Going into rendezvous at St. Joseph, Mo., they left that place the middle
- ↑ Afterward Mrs. Sarah Fisher Henderson.
