Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

The first of [the missionaries], a party of Methodists under Jason Lee, set off in 1834, traveling west with a fur traders’ caravan. At the rendezvous, they raised the hopes of Nez Perces and Flatheads who thought that they would settle in their home villages as teachers. But Lee went on to the Willamette Valley in western Oregon and opened a mission for the Indians. The next year two more missionaries, Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman, showed up at the 1835 rendezvous. They were sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, representing Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and two smaller denominations.

Parker and Whitman found the Nez Perces enthusiastic and anxious to have them settle in their homelands and instruct their people. Whitman returned to the states for reinforcements, and Parker, . . . accompanied a Nez Perce band over the mountains to the Clearwater River. . . .

He selected several sites for a mission station, but he did not feel able to make the trip back across the mountains to the 1836 rendezvous in Wyoming. Giving a Nez Perce a note to take to Whitman, he went down the Snake and Columbia rivers and eventually returned to the East Coast by sea. At the rendezvous, in the Green River Valley in Wyoming, the Nez Perces gave a spirited welcome to Whitman, who returned with his newly married wife, Narcissa. Also with him were another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding, a helper named William H. Gray, and two Nez Perce boys, whom Whitman had taken east with him for instruction in English and whom he had named Richard and John. Though the Nez Perces were unaware of it, tension existed among the missionary party members. Spalding was a severe, thin-skinned Presbyterian of 33 with a bitterness that stemmed from a childhood knowledge that he had been born out of wedlock. Moreover, he had once proposed marriage to Narcissa, who had rejected him. . . . (pp. 61-63)