Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company, regularized economic and cultural exchanges, including gift giving. Interactions were not always peaceful. Native Americans suspected that the whites had power over the new diseases that they suffered. Reports from the period note that members of the Umpqua, Makah, and Chinookan nations faced threats of destruction through white-carried illnesses, as the natives had no immunity to these new infectious diseases. After becoming the premier fur gathering operation in the region, the HBC continued to develop ties on the Columbian Plateau. Historian Cameron Addis recounted that after 1840, much of the Columbian Plateau was no longer important in the fur trade and that: ... most of its people were not dependent on agriculture, but traders had spread Christianity for thirty years. When Catholic and Protestant missionaries arrived they met Indians already content with their blend of Christianity and native religions, skeptical toward farming, and wary of the whites' apparent power to inflict diseases. Local Indians expected trade and gifts (especially tobacco) as part of any interaction with whites, religious or medical. Establishment of the mission Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman journeyed overland in 1835 from the Rocky Mountains into portions of the modern states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington to locate potential mission locations. Parker hired a translator from Pierre-Chrysologue Pambrun, manager of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) trading post Fort Nez Percés. He wanted help in consulting with the elite of the Liksiyu (Cayuse) and Niimíipu (Nez Perce) in order to identify particular places for missions and Christian proselytizing. During specific negotiations over what became the Waiilatpu Mission, six miles from the site of the present-day city of Walla Walla, Washington, Parker told the assembled Cayuse men that: I do not intend to take your lands for nothing. After the Doctor [Whitman] is come, there will come every year a big ship, loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. Those goods will not be sold, but given to you. The missionaries will bring you plows and hoes, to teach you how to cultivate the land, and they will not sell, but give them to you." Early contact Whitman returned the following year with his wife, Narcissa, mechanic William H. Gray, and the missionary couple Rev. Henry Spalding and Eliza Hart Spalding. The wives were the first known white American women to enter the Pacific Northwest overland. HBC Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin