1842-3 be explained, and however much his motives have been impugned, his name has become indelibly fixed in the national heart as one of its great heroes. The tragedy which awaited him upon his return, when he and his beloved Christian wife fell victims to savage cruelty, has made him a true martyr both to the cause which he nominally represented of Christianizing the Indians and to what he regarded the far greater cause of establishing American possession and civilization in the Columbia Valley.
The immediate result of the deputation of 1831 was therefore to start a Protestant missionary movement in Oregon. The Jesuits at St. Louis were still too weak in numbers to respond. They had had but very few recruits since the opening of the novitiate, and all these were needed in the new work incident to founding the university. It was impossible to spare any workers for this distant field.
In 1835 another deputation went to St. Louis. It appears that a Flathead chief, Insula by name, went to the Green river rendezvous in 1835 to meet the missionaries whom his people supposed to be Black-gowns, but who proved to be Protestant ministers. As they did not satisfy the description which the Indians had heard of the Catholic priests, Insula returned home and it was decided to send a deputation to St. Louis to ask for them. It was old Ignace who undertook the expedition and he took with him his two sons to have them baptized. He made the journey in the summer of 1835. (7) The little party reached St. Louis in safety; the
(7) Father Palladino, Indian and White in the Northwest, p. 19, says that "Ignace started with the intention of going to Canada, the place of his birth, where he thought he could more easily obtain missionaries for the Flatheads, which, as said, was the main object of his long, perilous journey. Learning, however, on his way that there were Jesuit Fathers at St. Louis, he turned his steps in that direction, and reached the place late in the fall, after frightful privations and sufferings." This, if true, is another indication that the 1831 deputation was not from the Flatheads, or they would have known of the presence of Jesuits in St. Louis, unless indeed none of the deputation succeeded in getting home.