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Title
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Letter to Mary Walker on getting Native students to stay at the Warm Springs School
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Description
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A letter from Cyrus Walker to his wife, Mary Wheeler Walker. At the time, Cyrus was a clerk and school teacher at the Warm Springs Indian Agency, and his wife and their child were living temporarily in another county. Cyrus describes trying to persuade Native families at Warm Springs to leave their younger children at the on-reservation boarding school. The Native families apparently had been planning to bring their children with them as they took part in seasonal hop-picking work. He reports the words of one Native man in Chinook Jargon mixed with English: "Wake close wawa copa school okok Sun. Okok sure Sunday. Pose tomorrow wawa hear close." (Approximate translation: "Not good to talk about school today. [Maybe?: Let's talk Sunday.] I suppose tommorow we'll talk/hear well enough." The next day, the Native man said that he would go hop-picking and Cyrus thought that there would likely not be many students enrolled in school when it started.
Cyrus Walker was the oldest son of the early Oregon Territory missionaries Elkanah and Mary Richardson Walker. He grew up at Tshimakain in the 1830s-40s, where he learned the native Spokane language. After joining the U.S. army during the Civil War and then attempting to make a living as a farmer, he became a teacher at the Warm Springs Indian Agency. These letters, documents and clippings shed light on his experiences as a missionary, a soldier, a pioneer and a teacher at Warm Springs. This collection was donated to Pacific University by Betty Thorne, a descendant of the Walkers.
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Creator
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Walker, Cyrus Hamlin
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Date
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1890
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Is Part Of
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Cyrus Walker Binder 1
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Identifier
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PUA_MS102_1890_08_3.pdf
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Provenance
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Donated by Betty Thorn, Walker Family descendant.
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Rights
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/
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Type
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Text
