Elkanah and Mary Walker, missionaries of the American Board for the Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), worked for nine years among the Spokanes at Tshimakain in the Oregon Territory. Through her extensive diary Mary offered a portrait of the antebellum woman caught in the tides of evangelicalism. Born in Maine in 1811, Mary attended a Congregational church but had her conversion experience during a Methodist revival. She came from an educated family and was ambitious for greater adventure than the dull prospect of life as a New England farmer's wife. In her missionary application, one of her teachers offered the following recommendation:

Her intellectual acquirements are more than respectable. She has a strong love for natural science and mathematics, in which her attainments are valuable She is a chemist and practical botanist . . . . The powers of her mind are strong and masculine...