Methodist Mission

Note: This page contains information about the Methodist Missions to the native people. Information about the missions to the Ukrainians is on another page.

  The Methodists Missionaries in Canada had two really successful eras, with the Ojibwa on the edge of the Great Lakes in 1820 and then later in present-day Alberta.

Background information about the Methodists:

    By the 1830s many people and organizations in Britain were becoming concerned about the fate of natives. The Hudson's Bay Company came under pressure to encourage education and religious instruction. So in 1840 the Hudson's Bay Company invited the Wesleyan (British) Methodists to send missionaries into the West. Among those who took up the challenge was James Evans, and Robert Rundle. 

    Robert Rundle was the first  Methodist missionary to come into the area that is now Alberta. He arrived in 1840 and stayed for eight years.  In 1847 Benjamin Sinclair, a native teacher came to help Robert Rundle. Rundle left the following year, and it wasn't until 1855 that Rev. Henry Steinhauer, and Thomas Woolsey, both newly ordained, came out to start their own missions. Rev. Steinhauer was an Ojibwa from Lake Simcoe, and after a few rather unsuccessful years at Lac La Biche, choose a mission site at Whitefish Lake and started his mission there in 1857. 

Steinhauer and Whitefish Lake:

Rev. Thomas Woolsey worked first out of Fort Edmonton, and then attempted to revive the Woodville Mission, at Pidgeon Lake, that Robert Rundle had started. Eventually, in 1860, he  established a mission just north of Smoking Lake, on a hill that came to be known as Mission Hill. The location was not very successful. 

In 1862 Rev. George McDougall convinced Woolsey to move the mission south to the river and named the site Victoria Settlement. George left his 19 year old son John at the mission as he continued on a tour of the different Methodist missions. John and Rev. Woolsey debated some about what style of house to build, with John supporting the idea of a Red River frame house and Woolsey preferring a log cabin style. Rev. Woolsey won the debate and they worked at preparing the wood. George returned east, and the next year returned to the mission site with his wife and five of his children to find that the house was not completed. After spending a winter in a buffalo-skin tent the family built a small cabin and then a large eight room house. The cabin was converted into a school house, with the first school being taught by James Conner (formerly of the Red River settlement). The nine student who attended the school's early beginnings included the McDougall children and the Steinhauer children.

McDougalls:

 After the McDougall's left Victoria Settlement other missionaries continued the mission there. In 1887 a second Methodist church was built two miles west, on river lot ten, and a third church was built on river lot six in 1906. That third church is now a part of the provincial historic site. On the front of it is painted the title "Pakan United Church" as the Methodist church joined to become part of the United Church in 1925.

More information on the later missionaries:

A second set of missions was established after the turn of the century, with a focus towards converting the new Ukrainian population. More information about the missions to the Ukrainians can be found here.

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