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.

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. In the wake of the Whitman Massacre in 1847, the Eells family relocated to the Willamette Valley, settling in Forest Grove. 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. In the course of his studies at Pacific, his family moved back to Washington Territory, settling at Waiilatpu, the site of the Whitman Massacre that had driven them from the Tshimakain Mission 14 years earlier. 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." He attended the Theological Institute of Connecticut in Hartford, his father's alma mater, from 1868 to 1871. He was ordained as a Congregational Minister on June 15, 1871.