Along the river lay a plateau full of flowers, birds, and butterflies, and over the great river and flowering plain the clear air glimmered.  Like some sun-god’s abode in the shadow of ages, St. Helens still lifted her silver tents in the far sky.  Eagles and mountain birds wheeled, shrieking joyously, here and there.  Below the bluffs the silent salmon-fishers awaited their prey, and down the river with paddles apeak drifted the bark canoes of Cayuses and Umatillas.

[Illustration:  Indians spearing fish at Salmon Falls.]

A group of children were gathered about the open door of the new school-house, and among them rose the tall form of Marlowe Mann, the Yankee schoolmaster.

He had come over the mountains some years before in the early expeditions organized and directed by Dr. Marcus Whitman, of the American Board of Missions.  Whether the mission to the Cayuses and Walla Wallas, which Dr. Whitman established on the bend of the Columbia, was then regarded as a home or foreign field of work, we can not say.  The doctor’s solitary ride of four thousand miles, in order to save the great Northwest territory to the United States, is one of the most poetic and dramatic episodes of American history.  It has proved to be worth to our country more than all the money that has been given to missionary enterprises.  Should the Puget Sound cities become the great ports of Asia, and the ships of commerce drift from Seattle and Tacoma over the Japan current to the Flowery Isles and China; should the lumber, coal, minerals, and wheat-fields of Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho at last compel these cities to rival New York and Boston, the populous empire will owe to the patriotic missionary zeal of Dr. Whitman a debt which it can only pay in honor and love.  Dr. Whitman was murdered by the Indians soon after the settlement of the Walla Walla country by the pioneers from the Eastern States.

Mr. Mann’s inspiration to become a missionary pioneer on the Oregon had been derived from a Boston schoolmaster whose name also the Northwest should honor.  An inspired soul with a prophet’s vision usually goes before the great movements of life; solitary men summon the march of progress, then decrease while others increase.  Hall J. Kelley was a teacher of the olden time, well known in Boston almost a century ago.  He became possessed with the idea that Oregon was destined to become a great empire.  He collected all possible information about the territory, and organized emigration schemes, the first of which started from St. Louis in 1828, and failed.  He talked of Oregon continually.  The subject haunted him day and night.  It was he who inspired Rev. Jason Lee, the pioneer of the Willamette Valley.  Lee interested Senator Linn, of Missouri, in Oregon, and this senator, on December 11, 1838, introduced the bill into Congress which organized the Territory.

Some of the richly endowed new schools of Oregon would honor history by a monumental recognition of the name of Hall J. Kelley, the old schoolmaster, whose dreams were of the Columbia, and who inspired some of his pupils to become resolute pioneers.  Boston was always a friend to Washington and Oregon.  Where the old schoolmaster now rests we do not know.  Probably in a neglected grave amid the briers and mosses of some old cemetery on the Atlantic coast.