After a failure to assimilate Indigenous children by early missionaries in the 17th century, educational programs were not widely attempted again by religious officials until the 1820s, prior to the introduction of state-sanctioned operations.[13] Included among them was a school established by John West, an Anglican missionary, at the Red River Colony in what is today Manitoba.[4]:50 Protestant missionaries also opened residential schools in the current Ontario region, spreading Christianity and working to encourage Indigenous peoples to adopt subsistence agriculture as a way to ensure they would not return to their original, nomadic ways of life upon graduation.[14]