[2] 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.
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.
[3] The party set out on April 28, 1834, traveling independently from the American Fur Company's caravan headed for the same destination.
[4] Lee built a mission school for Indians in the Willamette Valley at the site of present-day Salem, Oregon.
In 1835, Dr. Marcus Whitman made his initial journey west from New York, past the Rocky Mountains and into California.
The Spalding's founded a mission among the Nez Perce Indians at Lapwai, at the foot of Thunder Mountain, in present-day Idaho.
Francis Norbert Blanchet was appointed Vicar-General of Oregon Country by Archbishop Joseph Signay of Quebec in April 1838.
[8] 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.
Blanchet began using carved shale sticks in his conversion efforts in April 1839, during a visit to the Cowlitz settlement.