About the time the conferences were being held by Colonel Dodge, the Presbyterian Church sent out Samuel Parker and his bride, in answer to the call of the Nez Perce Indians, and they made their "honeymoon journey" into the west, which journey ended in their death at the hands of "praying Indians." Their melancholy fate has been laid to the door of commercialism, and the Hudson Bay Company was accused of instigating the massacre on the far shores of the Columbia.

But while traversing the wilderness of western Nebraska, their hearts sang with the joys of early married life, and they sang hymns and read and talked to the Indians, telling of the Promised Land "where the trail ends."

The Indians of this vicinity were very much interested in the Parkers, and especially their singing. It w,as so different from the wild cries which they had learned from the coyote and the eagle, and they came again and again, and asked them to sing.

Parker's map, made in 1838, included everything from the mouth of the Platte as Oregon. The law of the early forties, that gave to each emigrant, who found his way to Oregon, a section of land, might have been legally applicable to the sand hills of Nebraska, sixty years before the achievement of Wm. Neville and M. P. Kinkaid was upon the statutes. The territory of Nebraska was unorganized for many years after the passage of the Oregon homestead act, and in Idaho the Oregon statute was made to apply after Idaho became a state, because the act had not been repealed.