Continue to Stand in the Gap: Wasco County

The Dalles, Oregon

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy hill. Let all who live in the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming. It is close at hand— Joel 2:1 NIV

Blow the shofar in Tziyon! Sound an alarm on my holy mountain! Let all living in the land tremble, for the Day of Adonai is coming! It’s upon us! 

Joel 2:1 Complete Jewish Bible

 

Wasco County, originally one of the oldest and largest counties in the state, has long been an important crossroads in the Pacific Northwest. Celilo Falls, before being drowned by The Dalles Dam in 1957, was an important gathering and fishing place for the indigenous tribes for about 15,000 years, and The Dalles was an important destination along the Oregon Trail, as well as a gathering and trading place for the natives for centuries before the settlers appeared. Today, I-84 passes through The Dalles, the county seat, and is intersected by major highways going north and south.

 

The county has a three-person Board of Commissioners, although not the County Judge type. Steve Kramer is the chair, and his term is up at the end of 2024, so there are currently candidates campaigning for election in Wasco County. The other two commissioners, Scott Hege and Phil Brady are on the Board until 2026.

 

The Sheriff of Wasco County is Lane Magill. He oversees the 2,396 square mile county that has a population of 26,505.

Wasco County, Oregon

As can be seen from earlier posts, we have found the early Methodist Mission at Wascopam, near The Dalles, of great interest. The early Methodist missionaries, led by Jason Lee, understood the strategic importance of The Dalles area in their early campaign to convert the indigenous tribes to Christianity. Lee assigned his nephew, Daniel Lee, and missionary Henry Perkins to the mission at The Dalles while he dealt with the original mission in the Willamette Valley and traveled back east to garner support.

 

Many, if not all, historians consider the early missionary efforts at conversions a failure, with the missionaries unable to overcome the cultural and language barriers with the tribes, and also getting distracted by more material considerations, many giving up preaching and focusing on their own homesteads and business ventures. Jason Lee himself seemed to have turned his attention away from the Native Americans to the flood of settlers that began arriving. The Whitman Massacre in 1847 brought many missionary efforts to a screeching halt.

                                                                                              

Wascopam was a bright light in the midst of all this, however. We wrote here about the revival that occurred in 1839-40:

 

Perkins, although already on the mission field, had a conversion experience after an encounter with a visiting preacher, Benjamin Wright, on October 28, 1839. Perkins then converted the local shaman, Tumsowit, who began spending time alone in the hills (the spiritual custom of the Native Americans) to pray. Tumsowit began to convert others, and word began to spread. In the following weeks, the missionaries at Wascopam and the local native leaders held meetings in villages along the Columbia and soon reported 250 converts from their first efforts. They continued from village to village with Perkins preaching and teaching as far as the Cascade Mountains. In January of 1840, they continued upriver and then in April turned toward the interior to the Klickitat villages. They held a camp-meeting downstream from The Dalles where 1,000 to 1,200 attended in an area whose total population was only 1,600. Although their home-base in the Willamette Valley was skeptical of the spiritual outpouring, this was the most successful missionary endeavor of this period of Oregon history.

 

Pulpit Rock is a 12-foot tall formation at the intersection of Court Street and East 12^th in The Dalles. Preachers used it to speak to open-air crowds during pioneer days. Digging deeper we discovered in a book, The Wascopam Mission by Marcella M. Hillgren in the Oregon Historical Quarterly (Vol 39, No. 3 Sept., 1938 pp. 222-234) more insight into the manner in which Pulpit Rock was used by the missionaries.

 

            Among the pines near the south boundary of Dalles City a slender, basaltic pillar rises abruptly,             forming a natural pulpit from which in pleasant weather, the early missionaries preached to the                Indians. It was first used for religious services in 1838 and is still used today [1938] once a year             as the scene of Easter sunrise services.

Originally this pillar had two pinnacles rising about twelve feet from the base. One of these was chiseled off by Daniel Lee, the first missionary at The Dalles, for a table on which to place his Bible. The other is used as a seat. On this rock each Sunday Lee mounted and blew a horn which could be heard across the Columbia, to call the Indians to prayer. (emphasis added.)

She further comments:

The faith in the efficacy of prayer stressed by the Methodist religion seemed for a time to find a response to that tendency in the minds of The Dalles Indians and to impress them. They prayed assiduously for a time and affairs augured well but the effects here as elsewhere were not lasting….

We talk more about the spiritual nature of The Dalles tribes here. 

In our last post, we mentioned Dutch Sheets and “the synergy of the ages.” Synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of parts. The point was that early prayers are still “live” and we can purposely agree with them, creating a powerful combination. Joshua 23:10 says, “one shall put a thousand to flight, two ten thousand…” and perhaps that applies here. Our united prayers, even with those long gone, are synergistically multiplied.

While the early missionaries, the circuit riders, and a vast number of settlers all prayed – and it is recorded that they did – the words are rarely available. In our last post, on Sherman County, we discovered the words to a hymn sung by a church over a hundred years ago, in dedication. We can agree with that.

I do wish I could find recorded prayers by Daniel Lee or Henry Perkins, or the early Native converts, but the knowledge that Daniel Lee blew a horn that could be heard across the Columbia River from Pulpit Rock as a call to prayer amazes me. If Dutch Sheet’s idea of synergy is correct, those notes are still in the air over The Dalles, still calling us to prayer.

I can agree with that.