The Mission to California

Merritt G. Kellogg, elder son of Battle Creek businessman J.P. Kellogg, had in 1859, with his family, trekked to California by ox team. He worked in San Francisco for eight years as a carpenter. Then, as health reform was being promoted among Seventh-day Adventists, he returned to the East to take a medical course. He enrolled at Dr. Trall's Medical College, at Florence Heights, New Jersey, where a few months later he was granted a diploma as a qualified physician and surgeon. [In succeeding years kellogg took more advanced training.] He lingered in Michigan following his graduation, and at the General Conference session in mid-May made an earnest appeal that the General Conference should send a missionary to California to help him in his work in raising up a company of believers in San Francisco. The brethren agreed that in time such might be done.2BIO 242.2

J. N. Loughborough had come to the conference with the deep impression that he should go to California, but he had revealed this to no one. In no less than twenty dreams he seemed to be working there! At the meeting the ministers were given an opportunity to express their preferences as to the fields in which they should labor during the coming year. After most had expressed themselves, James White asked, “Has no one had any impressions of duty with reference to the California field?” Up to this time Loughborough had remained silent: now he stood and spoke of his impressions and offered his services for work in the West. Loughborough reported on what followed:2BIO 242.3

Brother White then remarked, “When the Lord sent forth His servants, He sent them two and two, and it seems as though two ministers should go to that distant field.” ...Then Elder [D. T.] Bourdeau arose and stated how his mind had been exercised, and that he had come to the meetings with his companion and all his earthly substance ready to go where the conference might say.—Pacific Union Recorder, July 3, 1913.2BIO 243.1

White counseled, “Will Brethren Bourdeau and Loughborough pray over this together and separately until the day the Review goes to press, that they may be sure of the mind of the Lord in the matter?”—Ibid.2BIO 243.2

At the appropriate time, when White called for their word, the two brethren replied, “California, or nothing.” White then called for $1,000 to buy a tent and start the mission. At this time the rails extended only to the Rocky Mountains; the journey had to be made by ship to the Isthmus of Panama and then by another ship to San Francisco. For the next year and beyond, readers of the Review were thrilled by the reports from the missionaries, first on the trip itself, and then on the tent meetings and the organization of churches in the valleys north of San Francisco.2BIO 243.3