THE MISSIONARIES AS PIONEER SCOUTS.
_____
IN the settlement of the wilds of America, it is to be noticed that the most successful colonies were those in which religious influence and Christian purpose predominated. The puritans, the baptists, the quakers and others paved the way for greater emigration to their respective colonies. So has it been with advancing civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores. It was the misssionaries sent out by the mission societies in the East, who were advanced scouts, and the forerunners who led the flow of emigration to the Pacific slope, and began the settlements of Christian civilization which has blossomed into states, from the Rocky mountains to the shores of the great ocean. To the Lees, Parker, Whitman, Gray, Spaulding, Eells and others of lesser note the credit belongs, of inducing the first settlements of pioneer immigrants which were destined to become permanent. As a writer says, "with the advent of these missionaries, endowed with stubborn and aggressive wills for right, and with American hearts, they were destined to group about them a people whose independent principles would instill them to grapple with an arbitrary and powerful corporation backed by English power. They came not for gain merely, but for the more holy and beneficent purpose of making homes, and surroundings themselves with such comforts of civilization as a pioneer life would afford them, and to instruct the natives in the arts of agriculture, and lead them in the paths of Christian duty; and over and above all should wave the star spangled banner of their country. Such were the class of pioneers who could not fail to attract such emigrants from the states necessary to build up states in a territory where its people are savages and their country a desolate wilderness." The story of Whitman's massacre, as portrayed by Dr. Hallock, in his oration on the fiftieth anniversary of that sad event, shows that the impress of the labors then begun are indelibly marked upon the present generations.