On arriving at the Mission of St. Pau16 of the Willamette, we proceeded at once to the residence of the Very Reverend Mr. Blanchet, who received us with the greatest kindness, and immediately placed at our disposal everything on the place. My first care was to seek some convenient locality where, according to the plan of our Very Reverend Father General, a mother mission could be established. For this purpose I made several unsuccessful excursions into the adjacent country. The most eligible situations were already occupied. The Methodists,' indeed, offered to sell me their Academy, which is a sufficiently large and handsome house, but entirely destitute of wood and arable land. In this perplexity Mr. Blanchet relieved me, by a generous and disinterested offer. He proposed to examine the property belonging to the mission, and take such portions of it as I should judge most proper for our projected establishment. We accordingly set out on this new excursion; but we had scarcely proceeded two miles when we came to a point unit
Is Dedicated January 6, 184o, by Vicar-General Blanchet; the first Catholic establishment in Oregon proper. Reverend M. Demers had been located in the Cowlitz valley, Washington (St. Francis Xavier), since October 13, 1839, but the log church at St. Paul was the oldest in the Pacific Northwest, having been built by the French inhabitants in 1836, in the expectation of the speedy arrival of priests.
e 1 cannot pass over one little incident: at the same time that the priests and nuns entered to establish themselves on the Willamette, several Protestant ministers and their wives were leaving the country in well-grounded despair, and going down the river on their way to the States. The great Methodist establishment, more than ten years old, was suppressed, and a little Protestant church, built by the Protestants who had just dismissed their minister, was offered to a Catholic priest. (From Father De Smet's manuscript journal.)
The Methodist mission in the Willamette valley was established in the fall of 1834 by Jason and Daniel Lee. It was closed in 1844, and all property sold: but according to the dates on record, the transfers were made before Father De Smet's arrival. "Thus," says Bancroft, "ends the history of ten years of missionary labor, in which nothing was done that ever in the least benefited the Indians, but which cost the missionary society of the Methodist Episcopal Church a quarter of a million dollars."