A Tepee in His Front Yard: A Biography of H. T. Cowley One of the Four Founders of the City of Spokane, Washington.

In 1838, two missionary couples, the Walkers and the Eellses, joined the party going west as a reinforcement to the Oregon Mission. Just married when the trip began, Mary Walker and Myra Eells rode on horseback from Missouri to Oregon, keeping diaries throughout the months on the hazardous trail. After spending a winter at the Whitman mission in present-day Washington, the Walkers and Eellses moved north to do missionary work among the Spokane Indians.

Throughout "On to Oregon" the presence of Myra Fairbanks Eells is deeply felt, but it is Mary Richardson Walker who will be remembered for perhaps the richest diary we have from a woman pioneering in the West.

Four newlywed couples, along with one single man, were sent to Oregon in 1838 to reinforce the two-year-old mission established by Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding. These reinforcements were to become legendary in the history of the Pacific Northwest for the incessant bickering and petty jealousies that eventually caused the deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and forced the abandonment of the mission effort. Uncertainty and conflict as well as willpower and endurance mark the story of the Oregon Mission and its charismatic, though contentious, missionaries. Simply getting to Oregon in the 1830s was a feat. Once they arrived, their efforts were doomed by their inability to agree on strategies for converting the Nez Perce and Spokane Indians. This Bison Books edition contains the very personal diary of Sarah Smith, "the weeping one" as the Indians remembered her. When read in chronological sequence with the nearly one hundred letters written by her husband, Asa, a compelling picture of their journey to Oregon and subsequent life at the mission emerges. Other letters, documents, and biographical sketches enhance the volume.

Narcissa Whitman and her husband, Marcus, went to Oregon as missionaries in 1836, accompanied by the Reverend Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza. It was, as Narcissa wrote, "an unheard of journey for females." Narcissa Whitman kept a diary during the long trip from New York and continued to write about her rigorous and amazing life at the Protestant mission near present-day Walla Walla, Washington. Her words convey her complex humanity and devotion to the Christian conversion and welfare of the Indians. Clifford Drury sketches in the circumstances that, for the Whitmans, resulted in tragedy. Eliza Spalding, equally devout and also artistic, relates her experiences in a pioneering venture. Drury also includes the diary of Mary Augusta Dix Gray and a biographical sketch of Sarah Gilbert White Smith, later arrivals at the Whitman mission.