Oregon missionaries

The Oregon missionaries were collectively the religious-minded pioneers who settled in the Oregon Country of North America starting in the 1830s with the intent of converting local Native Americans to Christianity. The Foreign Mission movement was already 14 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. It was not until the 1830s, when a schoolmaster from Connecticut, Hall Jackson Kelley, created his "American Society for the Settlement of the Oregon Country," that more interest and support for Oregon missionaries grew. Oregon missionaries played a political role, as well as a religious one, as their missions established US political power in an area in which the Hudson’s Bay Company, operating under the British government, maintained a political interest in the Oregon country. 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.

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. The party was called the Wyeth-Lee Party as Lee had contracted with Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who was going on his second trading expedition, to accompany him. The party set out on April 28, 1834 traveling independently from the American Fur Company's caravan headed for the same destination. Lee built a mission school for Indians in the Willamette Valley at the site of present-day Salem, Oregon. The school evolved from a mission school to a secondary school called the Oregon Institute, eventually becoming Willamette University, the oldest university on the West Coast.

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