page_title: Cushing Eells
section_title: Tshimakain (1838–48)
hierarchical_section_title: Cushing Eells / Tshimakain (1838–48)
caption_attribution_description: English: Tshimakain Mission in what is now Washington State, US
context_page_description: Cushing Eells was an American Congregational church missionary, farmer and teacher on the Pacific coast of America in what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. His first mission in Washington State was unsuccessful. Eells and his family had to leave after the Native Americans massacred a group of neighboring missionaries.
  They spent the next fourteen years farming and teaching in Oregon, before returning to Washington, where Eells founded a seminary that later became the Whitman College.
  Eells continued to teach and preach in Washington for the remainder of his life.
context_section_description: On March 5, 1838 Eells married Myra Fairbanks in Massachusetts. The couple left the next day for the west coast with fellow-missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker, William and Mary Gray, Asa Bowen Smith and his wife.
  On August 29, 1838 the party arrived at the winter lodge site of the Cayuse people at Waiilatpu on the Walla Walla River in what is now Washington state.
  The site would later be called the Whitman Mission after Dr. Marcus Whitman. 
  The Eells and Walker families moved on to Tshimakain among the Spokanes.
  On September 16, 1838 Eells conducted the first Protestant service in Stevens County at Chewelah, preaching through an interpreter.
  On January 11, 1840, the Eells house burned. Local Indians responded quickly to assist.
  When the Fort Colvile leader Archibald McDonald heard about the fire, he dispatched four men to make the house habitable.
  The Eellses had two sons while living at Tshimakain. Edwin Eells was born on July 27, 1841 and Myron Eells was born on October 7, 1843.
  Dr. Marcus Whitman was the attending physician at both births. Myra was thirty-seven years old when her first son was born.
  Myron Eells would become a missionary, and spent much of his life on the Skokomish Reservation, to the west of Puget Sound, where his brother Edwin was Indian Agent.
  Cushing and Myra Eells' mission was not successful. 
  Myra Eells wrote in 1847, "We have been here nine years and have not yet been permitted to hear the cries of one penitent or the songs of one redeemed soul."
caption: Tshimakain Mission, 1843, by Charles A. Geyer (1809–53)
exif: {}