“Providence will take care of me … I will wear a crown”: Frontier Circuit Rider, James O. Rayner, and the Land Laws of Early Oregon

James O. Rayner served as an itinerant minister for the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in the Oregon Territory from 1848 to 1859, where he worked circuits from Astoria to Jacksonville to reach a quickly expanding population of white residents. Through primary documents, including Rayner's unpublished papers, James V. Walker examines the personal struggles of a mid nineteenth-century circuit rider and how they reveal “not only the idealized goals of missionary work but also the realities of frontier life and the forces that promoted America's settler colonial expansion in the Pacific Northwest.” Rayner's diary and family letters provide readers a “narrow view” into how one minister “understood the contemporaneous historical events and forces that affected his life in Oregon,” including the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act, inception of the Cayuse War, forced removal of Indians from the Umpqua Valley, and the Rogue Indian War in Southern Oregon.