Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1871

The decision soon affected the Nez Perces, whose administration was awarded to the Presbyterians. The man they chose to be agent, John B. Monteith, a strong-willed son of a Presbyterian minister, arrived on the reservation in February 1871, determined to continue and strengthen the Presbyterian influence. Once again, Henry Spalding, the pioneer Presbyterian missionary, would play a role. After the treaty of 1863, Hale had appointed Spalding government schoolteacher at the Lapwai agency. But Spalding, who had grown increasingly cantankerous and dictatorial, fought with the agent and others, was grossly inadequate as a secular teacher, and was dismissed by the agent in 1865. Soon afterward, Catholic priests had had success in converting some of the treaty Nez Perces, but when they wanted to found a mission on the reservation, they were opposed by Lawyer and were forced to settle in Lewiston and administer principally to whites. Still, they maintained influence among a few bands.

In 1870, George Waters, a young Yakima Methodist preacher, and three of his followers conducted a series of emotional revival meetings that inspired an interest in Christianity among many treaty Indians. When Monteith arrived, he ordered the Yakima Methodists to leave, but Father Joseph M. Cataldo, a Jesuit priest who came down from his church among the Coeur d’Alene Indians, and Henry Spalding, assisted by Henry T. Cowley, a young, newly arrived Presbyterian missionary, heightened the Christian fervor that the Yakimas had awakened. Competing fiercely against each other, both Spalding and Cataldo made many converts among the Nez Perce treaty element. . . .

At the same time, Cowley established a mission home and school at Kamiah, where in 1871 a number of Presbyterian Nez Perces were organized into the First Presbyterian Church of Kamiah. . . . The church structure, which is today the oldest continually used Presbyterian church in Idaho, was completed the next year. . . . Old Joseph, one of Spalding's first two converts, but again a "heathen" in the eyes of the Christian reservation Nez Perces, died in August 1871 insisting that he had never sold his homeland. "Always remember that your father never sold his country," he told his son and successor, the 31-year-old Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht (Thunder Traveling to Loftier Mountain Heights), whom the whites would soon know as Young Joseph or Chief Joseph, "you must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother." (pp. 110-111, 115)