Oregon missionaries

The Oregon missionaries were pioneers who settled in the Oregon Country of North America starting in the 1830s dedicated to bringing Christianity to local Native Americans. There had been missionary efforts prior to this, such as those sponsored by the North West Company with missionaries from the Church of England starting in 1819. The Foreign Mission movement was already 15 years underway by 1820, but it was difficult to find missionaries willing to go to Oregon, as many wanted to go to the east, to India or China. Such missionaries had an influential impact on the early settlement of the region, establishing institutions that became the foundation of United States settlement of the Pacific Northwest.

Wyeth-Lee Party

In 1834, New York Methodist minister Jason Lee came to the Oregon Country as the first of these missionaries, to establish the first American settlement and to convert the native population. Lee built a mission school for Indians in the Willamette Valley at the site of present-day Salem, Oregon.

The Whitman's reached Fort Walla Walla on October 26, 1838, and founded a mission at Waiilatpu, about 25 miles east of Fort Wallo Wallo in the Walla Walla Valley, then the territory of the Cayuse Indians, in the present-day state of Washington. The Spalding's founded a mission among the Nez Perce Indians at Lapwai, at the foot of Thunder Mountain, in present-day Idaho.

Catholic Missionaries

Catholic missionaries in Oregon Territory followed two paths into the region, with missionaries, such as Father Francis Norbert Blanchet and Father Modeste Demers, coming from Quebec in 1837 and a later group of missionaries following a path similar to the Protestant missionaries coming from the Eastern America, such as Father Pierre-Jean De Smet in 1841.

Catholic missionary work in Oregon Territory officially began when Fr. Francis Norbert Blanchet was appointed Vicar-General of Oregon Country by Archbishop Joseph Signay of Quebec in April 1838. Fr. Blanchet and Fr. Modest Demers arrived in the region at Fort Vancouver on November 24 1838. Originally the missionaries used hymns and books which had been translated into the Chinook Jargon, a language used commonly among different native groups of the region for trade, in their conversion efforts. Realizing that the ideas and concepts within Catholicism were not coming across to their audiences, Fr. Blanchet began using carved shale sticks in his conversion efforts in April 1839, during a visit to the Cowlitz settlement. The shale stick, referred to as the Catholic Ladder, was carved with representations of Christian History. These shale sticks were then distributed to Native chiefs, starting in October 1839, to teach Catholicism. Soon after, the Catholic Ladder began to be produced in paper copies and later massed produced for distribution in the Pacific Northwest with Quebec church leaders arranging for the printing and shipping of 2,000 to the region.

Blanchet was made Bishop in 1843, along with the region being made into an Apostolic Vicariate which reached from the Arctic in the North, the Rockies in the East, and the US-Mexican border in the South. Later, in 1846, the region was made into the Ecclesiastical Province of Oregon with Blanchet becoming the archbishop of the archiepiscopal see of Oregon City. This made Oregon the second Ecclesiastical Province created in the US. The success in converting Native Americans to Christianity was varied. In some cases, the Indians were very suspicious of the missionaries, and this suspicion only increased when many of the Indians contracted diseases that were introduced by missionaries and White settlers.

As tensions between native tribes and White missionaries rose during the 1850s, resulting in small-scale wars between settlers and natives, like the Rogue River War, missionary work in Oregon was increasingly targeted at White immigrants from the eastern parts of the US, rather than native populations.