Tshimakain Mission

The Tshimakain Mission started in September 1838, with the arrival of Congregationalist missionaries Cushing and Myra Fairbanks Eells and Elkanah and Mary Richardson Walker to the area along Chamokane Creek at the community of Ford, Washington.

On April 23, 1838 after traveling to Independence, Missouri, the Eells, Walkers, William Henry and Mary Augusta Gray, Asa B. and Sarah Smith, and Andrew Rodgers, departed for the Oregon County with a Hudson Bay Company fur trader caravan to the Rendezvous.

[1] For the next nine years under the auspices of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Tshimakain missionaries lived with the Spokane people.

When the Fort Colvile leader Archibald McDonald heard about the fire, he dispatched four men to make the house habitable.

One of the Indians involved in the massacre had family at Fool's Prairie, now Chewelah, to the north of the Tshimakain Mission.

Major Joseph Magone with 60 volunteers escorted the Eells and Walker families to Oregon City on June 22, 1848.

But, in the spring of 1873, Spokane Garry invited the Reverend Henry Spalding to visit the area and baptize his people.