American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

EELLS, CUSHING

CUSHING (16 February 1810, Blandford, MA-17 February 1893, Tacoma, W A). Education: B.A. Williams College, 1834; B.D. East Windsor Theological Institute, CT, 1837. Career: agent for the American Board of Foreign Missions in Oregon Territory, 1838-48; schoolteacher and Congregationalist minister, OR and W A, 1848-93.

When Cushing Eells graduated from college, earnest young Congregationalists were taking their faith to places as remote as the Hawaiian Islands. What had been a New England religion was gaining converts across the nation and world. In the spirit of expansion, Eells planned at first to be a missionary among the Zulus in South Africa. But warfare there interrupted his plans, and he was sent instead to another remote locale, the Oregon Territory. He arrived in 1838, first visiting the mission begun by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and then moving on to minister among the Spokane Indians.

Eells was not adept at languages. While other missionaries were learning native tongues, devising alphabets, and translating the Bible, he preached simple Christianity through an interpreter and tried to set a good example in leading a Christian life. In an Indian uprising in 1847 the Whitmans were killed, but the Spokane tribe remained friendly. None the less, the mission was abandoned a year later. The mission board attempted to send Eells to Hawaii, but he preferred to stay in the Northwest. So he ended his association with the board and devoted the remainder of his'life to teaching and ministering on the frontier.

Eells taught in academies that became Whitman College and Pacific University. But he devoted most of his attention to scattered groups of unchurched Congregationalists, some of whom had not seen a minister for twenty years. Using his own funds he ministered without pay throughout Washington, built churches, and hired men to staff them. He once remarked, "I have believed the Scripture to such an extent that everything-soul, spirit, body, purse, house, land, horse, buggy-was laid on the altar of God." His "parishes" included Colfax, Medical Lake, Sprague, Half Moon, and Cheney in the eastern part of Washington Territory. He was the first Congregational minister to come to Oregon and he established the first Congregational Church in Washington. In 1883 the National Congregational Council characterized Eells as, "John the Baptist of the Home Missionary Society." Known affectionately as "Father Eells," he is a good example of the way that the Congregational Church of the 1800s entered the west almost as an afterthought, chasing the settlers.

Bibliography
B: DARB, 144-45; Myron Eells, Fat Mr Eells (Boston, 1894).