Myron Eells

Myron Eells (October 7, 1843 – January 4, 1907) was an American Congregational missionary, collector, and scholar of the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. During his lifetime, he was a leading authority on Native American culture and languages in the Pacific Northwest. He is best known for his monograph The Indians of Puget Sound and his voluminous work on Pacific Northwest languages, including Twana and Chinook Jargon, as well as his extensive collection of Indigenous cultural artifacts which were donated to Whitman College, an institution founded by his father, Cushing Eells.

Biography

Early life and education Myron Eells was born in 1843 to Cushing Eells and Myra Eells (née Fairbanks) at the Tshimakain Mission in Oregon Country near the future site of Ford, Washington. His parents had gone west in 1838 as missionaries to join the Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding party. They took a post at the new Tshimakain Mission with the Elkanah Walker family among the Spokane people, north of the Whitman Mission located at at Waiilatpu, near present-day Walla Walla. Whitman, a doctor, visited Tshimakain to help with Eells' birth, as well as that of his older brother Edwin. His father became a teacher at during this time. In 1859, his father founded Whitman College in honor of his fellow missionaries killed in the Whitman Massacre.

Eells enrolled at Pacific University in Forest Grove, attending from 1861 to 1866. From 1866 to 1868, he worked on his father's farm near Walla Walla, contributing to the local newspaper in his spare time. At Pacific University, he was told by the school's president that he needed to "go East" in order to "become an American." Shortly after taking his post in Washington Territory, he was invited to serve as a minister at a church at The Dalles, Oregon, for a significantly higher annual wage, but he chose to stay at the Skokomish Reservation.

He learned Chinook Jargon, a regional trade language, immediately upon arriving at Puget Sound after learning that each of the local languages would only allow him to communicate with one group of people at a time. Having been dissuaded from studying Twana (Skokomish) and Lushootseed, he instead preached in Chinook Jargon and employed translators for those who only spoke those languages.

He was the only Christian minister within 30 miles of the reservation in 1876. His missionary duties required extensive travel throughout western Washington, with preaching duties taking him to Shelton, Belfair, Clallam Bay, the Upper Skokomish, and even Puyallup when the Skokomish traveled there to pick hops.

In the course of his missionary work, he built one of the smallest steam crafts on Puget Sound to commute across Hood Canal, called the Myra after his late mother, but it sank a few months after launch. The syncretic religion included elements of Native American Religions, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Eells and his brother Edwin, a U.S. Indian agent, were involved in the early documentation and attempted suppression of the religious movement, at the time called the "Half-Catholic Movement." Castile calls Myron Eells the "major firsthand source" on the rise of the Shaker church. Despite the Eells brothers' belief that the Shaker movement would not last, the religion is still practiced in the Northwest today.

Alongside the Salishan languages of southern Puget Sound, including Twana and Chehalis, Eells was one of the leading early compilers and scholars of Chinook Jargon, publishing a dictionary and a collection of hymns he translated into the language in 1878.

Eells acquired a national reputation as a scholar and collector by the 1880s. He was a frequent contributor to publications of the Smithsonian Institution. His scholarly output was prolific, with hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and books to his name. Whitman College honored him in 1890 with an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree. He was offered the presidency of the college in 1891, but he declined the post at his doctor's urging. That same year, he was appointed as the superintendent of the Department of Ethnology for the Washington delegation to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Eells' documentation of the origins and spread of the Indian Shaker Church, as well as that of his brother Edwin in his role as an Indian agent, has been significant in the study of that religious movement. He was untrained in the nascent disciplines of anthropology and linguistics, and he has been categorized as a salvage ethnographer, who worked to preserve Indigenous culture while simultaneously participating in missionary efforts to assimilate Indigenous people into the settlers' culture. Eells Hill Road in Mason County bears his name, as did the former "Eells Precinct" census tract in the Skokomish Valley.

Hymns in the Chinook Jargon Language (1878) Indian Music (1879) History of Indian Missions of the Pacific Coast Oregon, Washington, and Idaho (1882) Ten Years of Missionary Work Among the Indians (1886) The Hand of God in the History of the Pacific Coast (1888) The Chinook Jargon (1893) Father Eells, or the Results of Fifty-five Years of Missionary Labors in Oregon and Washington (1894) The Indians of Puget Sound: The Notebooks of Myron Eells (1985, ed. George Pierre Castile)