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Baptist work among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.

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Baptists have attempted to Christianize Native Americans since Roger Williams. Leon McBeth related how a pre-Baptist Williams purposed to learn Indian languages, and by 1632, was conducting missionary work among the tribes of New England. (1)

Apparently, the first identifiable Indian convert was Japheth, a Connecticut man immersed into the Seventh Day Baptist Church at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1674. Progress, however, was always slow and fitful at best. By the end of the eighteenth century, Robert G. Gardner estimated only .34 percent of the Indian population east of the Mississippi was Baptist--one in three hundred. Due largely to the efforts of the Triennial Convention and the American Indian Association, Native American Baptists grew to 2.5 percent of the total Baptist population by 1845. (2) Before the Civil War stalled everything, American Baptists had sixty missionaries commissioned to serve among the Indians with reports of two thousand baptisms. (3)

The Pacific Northwest, however, experienced no such successes. Oregon and Washington were pioneer lands, and the first Baptist church did not constitute in the area until 1844. Wilderness conditions, sporadic warfare, and blatant prejudice made life dangerous and miserable for white settlers and threatened the very existence of many tribes. This article traces the ministry efforts toward Native Americans attempted by Baptists in the Pacific Northwest. Though the efforts and successes were paltry, recent times reveal new opportunities.

Beginnings in Native American Missions in the Pacific Northwest

Most histories on the topic of Native American missions are concerned with denominational or biographical efforts. Yet, Indians of the Pacific Northwest received their first knowledge of Christianity from individual English and American settlers and fur traders in the early 1800s. Those efforts were usually not missionary in nature, but exploitative. For the Native American, however, religion meant power, and the superior level of white culture meant their gods must be greater. The year 1825 proved to be an important one. Two Indian boys from the Spokane and Kootenay tribes were chosen to receive an education from the Church of England Mission in Red River, Canada. The two young men returned south to their tribes in 1830, and many began to adopt the simple Christianity espoused by these young men. Traders and trappers reported seeing Indians in Christian worship during the 1830s. Out of this experience, four Nez Perce Indians arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831, asking for the gospel to be brought to their territory. This set off worldwide interest in the Christianization of Indians in Oregon. (4)

While a Church of England influence initiated the quest, the Methodists and Presbyterians supplied the next foundational layer. Yet, a Baptist can arguably be considered as an indirect catalyst on the quickly unfolding events. In Boston, an enterprising school teacher named Hall J. Kelley founded the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory. Kelley, a Baptist, became fanatically dedicated to Oregon after reading an account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He visited the Northwest and returned home. In pamphlets and articles published in major New England newspapers, Kelley beat the drum of opportunity to all to...

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