Before action there must be knowledge. Energy without understanding is a waste of vital effort. A thousand million dollars has been expended by Christian men and women to enlighten and Christianize the people of Asia and Africa, the most of which has been wasted for want of proper understanding. And it is one of the forgivable weaknesses of mankind that he acts more from impulse than reason. But enlightened by knowledge, it is the noblest praise of fellowman that he will give his life for his country, or risk it for his fellowman-even a barbarian.
There were two moving influences or causes which set in motion the great scheme of planting the gospel in the hearts of the Oregon Indians. The first was a purely colonizing business proposition: but it furnished the knowledge on which sentiment could found action. The second was an appeal for light which far exceeded the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us." It caught the attention of Christian men and women as nothing had ever done before. It excited their imagination, aroused the dormant sympathies of their hearts and inspired them to the most noble deeds of self-sacrifice the world has ever beheld.
The chief character in the first of these moving influences was Hall Jackson Kelley, who was born at Orono, Maine, February 24, 1790. At the age of sixteen he left the public sehools and taught school for a time at Hallowell, Me. He attended college at Middlebury, Vermont, and was given the degree of A. M. in 1814. and by Harvard College in 1820. As early as 1817 he became interested in the Oregon country from reading of the expeditions of Lewis and Clark, Wilson Price Hunt and the founding of Astoria, and conceived the idea of himself leading a colony for the exploration and settlement of Oregon.
And so fully and completely had this idea taken possession of all his thoughts and ambition that he commenced writing and publishing letters to newspapers, circulars, pamphlets and maps about Oregon and kept up the agitation of his Oregon scheme in the New England states for sixteen years, when he started to Oregon alone. A list of all of Kelley's printed publications about Oregon would fill a page in this book. Some of the Oregon historians have been disposed to belittle Kelley 's work for Oregon; but they only expose their own want of knowledge of the subject. The following indisputable evidence copied from the history of Palmer. Mass., where Kelley is buried, establishes the claim of Hall J. Kelley to have been one of the prime movers of the missionary expeditions to Oregon.
"In the year 1831 I was editor of Zion's Herald, a religious paper sustaining the faith of the Methodist Episcopal church. In the above year I published for Hall J. Kelley a series of letters addressed to a member of Congress, developing his plans for the settlement of the Oregon territory. At other times Mr. Kelley made appeals through our paper, with a view to excite the minds of the Christian community to the importance of founding religious institutions in that territory. He was one of the first explorers of that region. and to his zeal and efforts is largely due the establishment of missionary operations in that country.
