CHAPTER ONE:
THE ATTACK

It is my painful task to make you acquainted with a horrid massacre which took place yesterday at Waiilatpu, about which I was first apprised early this morning by an American who had escaped, of the name of Hall, and who reached this place half naked and covered with blood.

—William McBean, Fort Walla Walla, to Hudson’s Bay Company Board of Management, Fort Vancouver, November 30, 1847

The attack began shortly after the noon meal on November 29, 1847—around 1:00 p.m., according to some accounts; closer to 2, according to others. In the moments before the first blows were struck and the first screams were heard, Mary Ann Bridger, the twelve-year-old daughter of mountain man James F. “Jim” Bridger and a Flathead Indian woman, was in the kitchen in the large, T-shaped Mission House, washing dishes. John Sager, seventeen, the oldest of a family of seven children who had been adopted by the Whitmans after the deaths of their parents on the Oregon Trail in 1844, also was in the kitchen, winding brown twine for brooms. Narcissa Whitman was helping two of John’s sisters bathe in a wooden tub in the living room. Marcus Whitman sat nearby, reading. A carpenter named Josiah Osborn was repairing floorboards in a large corner room that had once been reserved for use by Indians but had recently been turned over to him and his family. Some of the mission children were in the schoolroom with their teacher. Outside, three newly arrived emigrant men had hoisted a steer on a derrick and were butchering it. A small group of Cayuse Indians stood a short distance away, watching. It was a cold, overcast day.

Canadian artist Paul Kane drew this sketch of the Whitman Mission in July 1847, four months before a group of Cayuses attacked the mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others. Used with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM; 946.15.318.

More than seventy people had settled in for the winter at the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, most of them emigrants who had arrived that fall and were too weary, sick, or destitute to continue their journey west until the spring. Five families were crammed into a building called the Emigrant House, along with three single men. A family of seven had makeshift quarters in the blacksmith shop. The Whitmans, their wards (including Mary Ann Bridger, two other métis or mixed-race children, and the seven Sager orphans), the Osborn family, and half a dozen other people lived in the main Mission House. The newest occupant was ten-year-old Eliza Spalding (named after her mother). Her father, Henry Spalding, one of Whitman’s fellow missionaries, had brought her to the mission to attend school just one week earlier. Two other emigrant families, with a total of eleven people, were sharing a cabin at the mission’s sawmill in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, twenty miles away.

It’s not clear how many people were occupying two nearby Cayuse villages headed by a man named Tiloukaikt (the most common spelling of his name). The entire Cayuse tribe, divided among three major bands, probably consisted of fewer than five hundred men, women, and children. Tiloukaikt’s band had been decimated by an outbreak of measles that began in the fall of 1847. “We have the measles all about us,” Marcus Whitman wrote to a missionary colleague at The Dalles.1 Measles also swept through the mission community, sickening several young adults and at least a dozen children, but only one (Josiah Osborn’s six-year-old daughter) had died. In contrast, mortality among the Indians—who had no acquired immunities against any of the infectious diseases introduced by Euro-Americans—was shockingly high. An estimated thirty Indians living near the mission, mostly children, died between the first week of October and the end of November.² The fact that nearly all of Whitman’s white patients recovered while his Indian patients did not led some Cayuses to suspect that he was using poison to deliberately kill Indians.

Henry Spalding spent about a week in the area after bringing Eliza to the mission on November 22, 1847. He visited one of Tiloukaikt’s villages on November 23. That day, “three Indians died, including a child,” he wrote. “It was most distressing to go into a lodge of some ten fires and count twenty or twenty-five, some in the midst of measles, others in the last stages of dysentery, in the midst of every kind of filth, of itself sufficient to cause sickness, with no suitable means to alleviate their inconceivable sufferings, with perhaps one well person to look after the wants of two sick ones.”³ Two days later, Spalding traveled to another village. “Found the Indians everywhere sick with the measles, dying from one to three daily,” he wrote.⁴ On the evening of November 27, Spalding and Whitman left Waiilatpu together to visit a Cayuse community on the Umatilla River, twenty-five miles south, in response to reports of illness there. Whitman returned to the mission late the next day. Spalding, injured in a fall from his horse, stayed behind—a move that probably saved his life.

Three children from Tiloukaikt’s band were buried on the morning of November 29, one of them reportedly a son of the headman. Two of Tiloukaikt’s other children had died earlier, as had the wife of Tomahas (also spelled Tamáhus), another Cayuse leader. Sometime after the burials, a group of Cayuses—fourteen to eighteen, by most estimates—armed themselves with clubs, tomahawks, guns, and knives; covered the weapons with blankets; and went to the mission complex. Most gathered around the derrick where the steer was being butchered. Whitman noticed their presence but did not think it unusual because, as Catherine Sager put it later, Indians “always came around on such days to get what was thrown away.”5 Two Indians pounded on the back door of the kitchen at the Mission House, then pushed their way in and asked for medicine. People in adjoining rooms heard loud voices. Some of them swore later that the voices were those of Tiloukaikt and Tomahas.

Roused by the noise, Whitman went to the kitchen, telling Narcissa to bolt the door behind him. Mary Ann Bridger, who had spent half her life with the Whitmans, was the only eyewitness to what happened in the kitchen after that. She said that when Whitman turned toward a cupboard, presumably to get the medicine, one of the Indians drove a tomahawk into his head. Mary Ann fled outside and ran around the building to the front, screaming. Whitman lay on the floor, a deep gash on the back of his head, three slashes across his face. John Sager had been shot by a rifle and his throat was cut. Still alive, both Whitman and Sager would linger for hours before dying.6 The rifle shot may have been a signal. Outside, Cayuses near the butchered steer pulled out weapons they had hidden beneath blankets and began firing. “All over the place was heard at once the firing of guns, the yelling and war whoops of the Indians,” Eliza Spalding wrote in a memoir published in 1916. “Dear reader, for years the firing of a gun or sudden shout brought up vivid memories of that terrible hour and place.”⁷

Twenty people who survived the attack eventually wrote about or were interviewed about what they saw—or thought they saw. Most survivors, like Eliza, were children at the time and did not publicly recount their experiences until many years later. It’s impossible to know the degree to which their stories were colored by trauma or by what they had been told or by the simple haze of time. As historian Ari Kelman, in a book about the Sand Creek Massacre, has noted: “Scenes of violence, especially mass violence, are notorious for breeding unreliable and often irreconcilable testimony.”⁸ The historical record also includes reports by several people who were not at the mission on the day of the attack but became closely involved in subsequent events, including a Catholic priest who arrived two days later and helped bury the dead; Hudson’s Bay Company officials at Forts Walla Walla and Vancouver; and Henry Spalding. The details in these various accounts, whether written within a few days of the attack or decades later, are often contradictory, sometimes lurid, and consistently ethnocentric.

The Cayuse perspective is difficult to recover. Non-Indians—explorers, fur traders, missionaries, settlers, government agents—left diaries, letters, periodicals, books, and other written records that historians can mine today. The Cayuse, like other indigenous peoples, recorded their history orally. But that oral tradition was weakened after the attack. “People wouldn’t talk about it publicly,” Roberta Conner, director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, remarked in 2018. “We got stuck with the ‘murderer’ label. It was a source of shaming for a long, long time.”⁹ The Cheyenne and Arapaho who survived the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 (when American troops attacked a peaceful village in Colorado and slaughtered hundreds) had grief and outrage to keep alive their stories about what had happened, to be passed down through the generations. That wasn’t the case when it came to the Cayuse and the Whitmans. Consequently, important information is missing from the historical record. What’s clear, however, is that the Whitman Mission was engulfed by violence in an outburst that began in the early afternoon of November 29, and the first target was the man who had once promised to “save” the Indians.

The first gunshots were followed by panic and confusion. In the schoolroom of the Mission House, teacher Lucian Saunders looked out the window and saw a wounded man running toward the house, his arm hanging limp at the elbow and covered in blood. Saunders, a lawyer from Oskaloosa, Iowa, had arrived at Waiilatpu in October 1847 with his wife, Mary, and their five children. Whitman was impressed by his credentials and had convinced him to spend the winter teaching school at the mission. According to one of the students, when Saunders saw what was happening outside, he ran out of the room and down the stairs, saying something like “I must go to my family.” With that, “we boys went to the window and saw that the Indians had dropped their blankets and were running about with their weapons in their hands, shooting and shouting.”¹⁰

The wounded man was Nathan Kimball, one of the three emigrants who had been butchering the steer. He had been shot in the arm. One of the other men, William Canfield, had a wound from a gunshot in his side. The third, a bachelor named Jacob Hoffman, was dead. Walter William Marsh, a widower with two children, was also dead, shot as he ran from the gristmill where he had been working. Saunders had been overtaken, seized, and clubbed to death by two Indians as he tried to reach the Emigrant House—about four hundred feet from the Mission House—where his family and many of the other women and children were. Matilda Sager, who was eight years old at the time, claimed more than seventy years later that Saunders had been beheaded and that she had seen his body, “lying there with his head severed.”11 Matilda was the third and last of the Sagers to publish her memoirs; she may have felt pressure to outdo her two older sisters by spicing her account with gruesome but invented details. Still, by any measure the attack was brutal. Many of the killings were done at close quarters, with hatchets and clubs, not with bullets fired at a sanitary distance. The first outsider on the scene, the Jesuit missionary Father Jean B. A. Brouillet, said he saw three victims whose skulls had been crushed.

The scene in the Mission House was chaotic. Ten-year-old Elizabeth Sager leaped naked from the tub in the living room. Her twelve-year-old sister, Catherine, who had just finished dressing, ran toward the door. Narcissa wailed something about being a widow but then composed herself. She called Catherine back and told Elizabeth to put on her clothes. Kimball burst into the room, holding his bleeding arm. Elizabeth remembered him saying, “The Indians are killing us. I don’t know what the damned Indians want to kill me for—I never did anything to them. Get me some water.” The incongruity of hearing a swear word in the Whitmans’ living room made the little girl giggle. She expected Narcissa to chastise him for cursing and was surprised when she said nothing and instead got water and began washing Kimball’s arm.¹²

Several emigrant women had rushed into the living room when the firing began. Narcissa told one of them—Margaret Osborn, the carpenter’s wife—to go back into the former “Indian Hall” with her husband and children and lock the door. Then Narcissa and two of the other women dragged Marcus from the kitchen into the adjacent dining room and laid him on the floor, putting a pillow under his head. Narcissa got a towel and some ashes to try to staunch the flow of blood and asked if there was anything else she could do for him. He whispered “No.”¹³

The Cayuses were well-organized, well-armed, and focused. With the single exception of Narcissa Whitman, they targeted only the male “Bostons” (a term widely used among Northwest tribes for Americans) at the mission. A French Canadian hired hand and three métis boys were not molested. The initial assault probably lasted less than fifteen minutes.¹⁴ When it ended, three men were dead and six others seriously wounded (including John Sager who, at seventeen, would have been considered fully grown by the Indians). Only one of the whites managed any kind of a defense. Jacob Hoffman struck at his attackers with his axe before he was killed. A tailor who had been at work in the Emigrant House on a new Sunday suit for Marcus Whitman was fatally wounded when an Indian stepped into his room and shot him point-blank. Andrew Rogers, a young would-be minister who had lived at Waiilatpu for two years, had been at the river filling a pail with water and was shot in the wrist while sprinting back toward the Mission House. He crashed into the exterior door to the dining room, breaking the glass in the upper half, before the door was unbolted and he tumbled inside. When he saw Whitman lying on the floor, he asked if he was dead. Whitman reportedly answered with a weak “No.” If he spoke again, no one heard him.

Narcissa was standing by the door, looking through the broken glass, when she was shot. Some of the witnesses said she was shot in the right shoulder; some said the right side; others said the left breast. She shrieked, clutched her wound, and sank to her knees. Rogers helped her to her feet. She and the rest of the frightened group—thirteen in all, including three children who had been sick in bed with measles—retreated to a dormitory on the second floor. Marcus Whitman, now unconscious, was left below.

The schoolchildren, meanwhile, had fled to a loft above the schoolroom. Eliza Spalding described the loft as a makeshift affair, consisting of just “a few boards overhead,” with no staircase or ladder to reach it. Some of the older boys hurriedly pushed a table to the center of the room, piled some books on it, climbed up, and pulled in the younger children. Francis Sager, at fifteen the oldest in the group, then “told us all to ask God to save us,” according to his sister Matilda.15

Among the children who were huddled in the loft were the three métis boys: thirteen-year-old John Manson and his eleven-year-old brother, Stephen, whose father, a French Canadian employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had brought them to the mission to attend school a few weeks earlier; and a boy Narcissa had named David Malin, about eight, who had lived with the Whitmans for five years. During a lull following the gunshot that wounded Narcissa, Joseph Stanfield, a French Canadian who worked for the Whitmans, came into the schoolroom and called up into the loft, telling the Manson brothers and David to come down. Stanfield assured them that because they were part Indian, they would not be harmed. He helped them down, then took them to the lodge of Nicholas Finlay (sometimes spelled Finley), a former fur trapper. Finlay and his Cayuse wife, Josephte, lived about a quarter mile east of the mission. Later, some of the survivors would claim that the lodge had served as the headquarters for the Cayuses who planned and carried out the attack; others would say that Finlay and his wife helped restrain some of the Indians and protected the women and children who became hostages.

With the departure of the three boys, the only member of the mission community who was fluent in Nez Perce—the primary language of the Cayuse—was ten-year-old Eliza Spalding. She had been born on Nez Perce land at the Spalding Mission at Lapwai, in present-day Idaho, and had grown up among Nez Perce Indians, close relatives of the Cayuse. She would be called upon to serve as interpreter as events unfolded over the next days and weeks.

As dusk fell, a little after 4:00 p.m., some of the Cayuses broke into the main floor of the Mission House, smashing windows and doors, plundering the pantry, scattering books and papers, taking coveted items like pots and pans, and tossing aside the rest. Josiah Osborn, his wife, Margaret, and their three surviving children—Nancy, seven; John, three; and Alexander, two—heard the commotion from where they cowered in their room in the northwest corner of the building. Osborn had lifted up some loose floorboards, and the family had crawled into a three-foot-high space below. “In a few moments our room was full of Indians, talking and laughing as if it were a holiday,” Nancy Osborn said in an account written in 1912, sixty-five years after the attack. “The only noise we made was by my brother Alex, two years old. When the Indians came into our room and were directly over our heads, he said, ‘Mother, the Indians are taking all of our things.’ Hastily she clapped her hand over his mouth and whispered that he must be still.”¹⁶ Matilda Sager, hiding with other schoolchildren in the loft upstairs, remembered hearing the sound of dried berries rattling on the floor of the pantry as Indians emptied storage containers.¹⁷

At some point—the eyewitness accounts are contradictory, and none pinpoint the time—a Cayuse named Tamsucky came to the base of the stairway and called up to the people in the rooms above. Speaking in English, he said the Indians were planning to burn down the Mission House and that Narcissa and all those who were with her should leave immediately. Catherine Sager thought that Narcissa seemed eager to believe that “God maybe has raised us up a friend.”¹⁸ Accompanied by Rogers and most of the others, Narcissa slowly came down the stairs. She reportedly averted her face when she saw her husband’s bloodied, mutilated head. Weak from loss of blood herself, she sank down onto a settee in her wrecked living room.

The schoolchildren also left their refuge in the loft and went downstairs, escorted by Joseph “Joe” Lewis, a man of French Canadian and Indian heritage who had briefly worked for Whitman. As they passed through the kitchen, the children saw the body of John Sager. Eliza Spalding described him as “lying in a huddled heap, his throat cut from ear to ear, not yet dead.”19 After John had been attacked, hours earlier, he had had enough presence of mind to stuff a part of a woolen scarf that he had been wearing into the gash in his neck. Approaching his older brother’s body, Francis Sager impulsively leaned over and pulled at the scarf, unleashing a gush of blood. John died soon afterward. The wounded Kimball stayed behind, in the upstairs dormitory, along with Catherine Sager, her two youngest sisters, and another of the Whitmans’ wards, Helen Mar Meek (nine-year-old daughter of mountain man Joseph L. “Joe” Meek and a Nez Perce woman). The two young Sager girls and Helen were all sick with measles.

It was now almost dark. Of the fourteen male “Bostons” on the premises when the attack began, one had escaped and was on his way to Fort Walla Walla, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post at the confluence of the Walla Walla and Columbia Rivers, about twenty-five miles west of the mission. Two others had managed to hide. Two young emigrant men were seriously ill and bedridden, possibly with measles; the Indians ignored them for the moment. The rest of the men were either dead or wounded.

In her account of the day’s events, Eliza said she and the other schoolchildren were standing outside the Mission House when she heard Tamsucky tell Narcissa Whitman and Andrew Rogers that the Indians wanted all the survivors to go into the Emigrant House. “Mrs. Whitman said, ‘No, we are afraid,’ ” Eliza wrote. He tried to reassure her, saying, “You will not be molested and we are sorry for what has been done.” Narcissa said she was too weak to walk on her own. Tamsucky ordered that she be carried out on the settee. Joe Lewis picked up one end, Rogers took the other end despite his wounded arm, and together they carried Narcissa from the living room through the kitchen and out the north door into the main yard. A short distance from the house, Lewis dropped his end of the improvised litter and jumped out of the way. A group of Cayuses “raised the yell,” wrote Eliza, and began firing. Rogers looked up, said “Oh, my God,” and collapsed.20 Lorinda Bewley, a young emigrant woman who followed Rogers out of the Mission House, said the ball that hit him passed so close to her that it stung her fingers. (Rifles fired spherical lead balls in those days; pointed bullets were not yet in use.²¹) Two balls struck Narcissa, one of them smashing into her cheek.²²

Although mortally wounded, Rogers would live for several more hours. Narcissa was apparently killed instantly. The schoolchildren, watching from where they had been lined up against the Mission House, saw her body as it rolled from the settee into the mud. Eliza Spalding said one Indian grabbed Narcissa’s hair, raised her head, and beat her dead face with a war club. Matilda Sager said the Indian used a riding whip, not a club.²³ They agreed that there were no tears or shrieks from the children; they were all stunned, even the youngest, into silence.

Joe Lewis’s role in the attack on the Whitman Mission is unclear. Some of the survivors said he had been an agitator, goading the Cayuse to violence because of an undying hatred for whites. Born in Canada to a European father and a Delaware mother, he was said to have fought with the US Army under Major John C. Fremont in California during the Mexican-American War in 1846. He joined an emigrant train at Fort Hall in present-day Idaho in 1847 and arrived at Waiilatpu in either late October or early November. Whitman hired Lewis as a laborer, although he privately described him as “a worthless vagabond, not worth the food he eats.”²⁴ Lewis allegedly told some Cayuses that he had overheard conversations between the Whitmans and Henry Spalding in which the missionaries talked about poisoning Indians and argued about whether they should be poisoned quickly or gradually. Yet the Cayuse did not appear to trust Lewis completely, and at least one taunted him for not having taken an active part in the killings. Perhaps in response, Lewis raised a pistol and turned it on Francis Sager.

At fifteen, Francis, like his seventeen-year-old brother John, would have been considered an adult. Lewis pulled Francis from where he had been standing, in the line of schoolchildren, between Eliza and his sister Matilda. Nancy Osborn, hidden with her family beneath the floorboards in the Mission House, said she heard Francis cry out, “Oh Joe, don’t shoot me.”²⁵ There was a single gunshot. Francis “fell at our feet,” wrote Eliza, adding, “I was sure our time had come. I put my apron over my face. I did not want to see the guns pointed at us.”²⁶

But there was no more gunfire that day. The Indians ushered the schoolchildren and most of the other survivors into the Emigrant House and then returned to their villages. Nathan Kimball, Catherine Sager, and the three sick girls remained in the dormitory. The dead were left where they had fallen. “As soon as it became dark,” wrote Nancy Osborn, “the Indians left for their lodges…. Everything became still. It was the stillness of death.” From their hiding place in the old Indian room, the Osborns heard the moans of the dying Rogers, lying just six feet away. “We heard him say, ‘Come Lord Jesus, come quickly.’ Afterward he said faintly, ‘Sweet Jesus.’ Then fainter and fainter came the moans until they ceased all together.”²⁷ The day ended with nine people dead—one woman, six men, and two teenage boys.

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The first news of the attack reached the outside world the next morning, when Peter D. Hall pounded on the gate at Fort Walla Walla. Hall, an emigrant from Illinois, had been installing a floor in the second story of the Mission House when the initial shots were fired. Mary Saunders (the schoolteacher’s wife) said she saw him climb out a windowsill, slide down the building, and run toward the willows along the Walla Walla River. Several Indians chased after Hall, but he escaped.28 William McBean, the Hudson’s Bay Company trader who was in charge of the fort, had reasons to resist taking him in. With only five men to help him defend the post, McBean did not want to appear to be siding with the Americans against the Cayuse. He said later that at Hall’s request, he had given him a coat, blanket, tobacco, and other supplies and seen him rowed to safety across the Columbia River, away from any pursuing Indians.²⁹ Hall was never seen or heard from again. Some believe he drowned; others that he was ambushed by a Cayuse who had followed him. In any case, Hall is sometimes counted as a fourteenth victim of the “Whitman Massacre.” He left behind a wife and five daughters, who, along with some forty others, were held as hostages by the Cayuse.

William Canfield, one of the men who had been wounded in the early minutes of the attack, waited until nightfall to leave where he was hiding, in the blacksmith shop, and try to escape. He told his wife that his life would be in danger if the Indians found him. He said he wanted to warn the Spaldings in case the Cayuse attack was part of a general Indian uprising. Although he had never been to the Spalding Mission, about 120 miles to the northeast, Canfield knew the general direction and the trail was fairly well marked. He arrived there on December 4, some four and a half days later.

The Osborn family also slipped away from the mission during that first night. The moon had risen by the time they crept out from under the floorboards; although in its last quarter, it provided enough light for them to make their way to the river and begin walking the twenty-five miles to Fort Walla Walla. They had gone just a few miles when Margaret Osborn collapsed. She had given birth two weeks earlier (to an infant who lived for only a few hours). She may also have been recovering from measles. Her husband, Josiah, left her hidden in some brush with Nancy and their two-year-old son; and then he walked on, carrying three-year-old John on his back. He stumbled into the fort on the morning of December 2. With help from a Walla Walla Indian who was working as a guide for McBean, Josiah returned and rescued the rest of his family the next day. McBean, still wary about antagonizing the Cayuse, reluctantly allowed the Osborn family to stay at the fort. Even though the Indians returned to their own lodges each night, leaving the mission unguarded, none of the other survivors of the assault tried to escape. Most of them were women and children. They were strangers in that land; they would not have known which way to go to find help. They chose to stay put and hope for rescue.

Two more men were killed on the morning of November 30, the day after the initial attack. The first was Nathan Kimball, who had found refuge in the Mission House after being shot during the initial burst of gunfire. After spending a restless night in the dormitory with Catherine Sager and the three feverish girls, Kimball wrapped a blanket around himself as a sort of disguise and left to get water from the river. He had filled a bucket and started back toward the house when he was seen, shot again, and this time killed. Later that morning, twenty-four-year-old James Young, who had been working with his father and two brothers at the sawmill in the Blue Mountains, was shot as he approached the mission with a wagonload of lumber. Joe Stanfield, the Whitmans’ French Canadian laborer, found Young slumped on the ground with a bullet in his head. Stanfield buried the young man where he lay.

After the death of Kimball, Joe Lewis and several Cayuses climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Mission House and found Catherine Sager and the three other girls trembling in a corner, the younger ones crying. When Lewis asked why the girls were crying, Catherine said they were hungry, thirsty, and frightened. The Indians brought them food and water and tried to calm their fears by telling them, through Lewis, that they would be taken to Fort Walla Walla soon, but meanwhile they should join the women and the other children in the Emigrant House.

At that point the Cayuse probably did not intend to hold the survivors as hostages. Tiloukaikt, head of the two villages closest to the mission, made a point of telling Mary Saunders that she and the others would soon be on their way to Fort Walla Walla. Again that night the Cayuse returned to their lodges, leaving the survivors unguarded but fearful. “Before night all the Indians went away to their own village and we were left in peace until the morrow,” wrote Mary Saunders. “But the dead still lay unburied and no woman dared to go out of the house to mourn over her loved ones or to care for their remains. To add horror to the situation, the Indian dogs howled all night long.”30

Father Brouillet arrived the next morning, on December 1. The Catholic priest had established a mission on the Umatilla River, about twenty-five miles southwest of Waiilatpu, just a few days earlier. He had heard about the ravages of measles among Tiloukaikt’s people and decided to visit “for the purpose of baptizing the infants and such dying adults as might desire this favor.” He reached Tiloukaikt’s main village, about three miles east of Waiilatpu, late on the evening of November 30 and learned to his shock what had happened the day before. He baptized three sick children at daybreak and prepared to travel on to the Whitman Mission. Two of the children died before he left.31

Brouillet described what he saw at Waiilatpu in a letter to officials at Fort Walla Walla, dated March 2, 1848: “Ten dead bodies lying here and there, covered with blood and bearing the marks of the most atrocious cruelty—some pierced with balls, others more or less gashed by the hatchet. Dr. Whitman had received three gashes on the face. Three others had their skulls crushed so that their brains were oozing out.”³² The women in the Emigrant House were sewing “winding sheets” (shrouds) for the dead from a bolt of muslin that Tiloukaikt had brought them. Joe Stanfield had begun digging a mass grave. Brouillet, two Walla Walla Indians, and a Cayuse elder that the whites called Chief Beardy helped finish the grave. The survivors watched and wept as the dead were placed in a wagon—“all piled up like dead animals,” one of the Sager girls recalled—and then buried in a shallow trench, six feet long, twelve feet wide, and four feet deep.³³

Six days later, the two young men who had been sick at the time of the initial attack—Amos Sales, in his early twenties, and Crockett Bewley, eighteen-year-old brother of Lorinda—were dragged from their beds, beaten with clubs, and tomahawked to death.³⁴ Eliza Spalding thought the men were killed because they had begun to recover and the Indians “were afraid they might skip out some night.”³⁵ There were reports that one of Tiloukaikt’s sons, known to the whites as Edward, had consulted a “great chief” at the Umatilla who told him the men’s diseases would spread if they were allowed to live. Historian Clifford Drury, author of numerous books about the missionaries, attributed the deaths to tension between Tiloukaikt and the young warriors, including his son. “The murder of James Young on the day after Tiloukaikt had promised that there would be no more killings, was evidently done without the chief’s knowledge or consent,” he wrote. “The murder of the two sick men, Sales and Bewley, took place when Tiloukaikt was away and his son Edward was seemingly in charge.”³⁶

There was no more killing after that. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were dead, along with eleven others. Peter Hall was missing and presumed dead. Hannah Louise Sager and Helen Mar Meek both died of measles not long after being taken to the Emigrant House. William Canfield was safe at Lapwai. The Osborn family was recovering at Fort Walla Walla. Tiloukaikt had sent three Cayuses to the sawmill to bring the people there down to the mission. The group included Elam Young (James’s father) and his two surviving adult sons, and Joseph Smith, an emigrant from Illinois, and his wife and five children. They arrived just after dark on December 7, several hours after the deaths of Sales and Bewley. On the whispered advice of some of the emigrant women, the men told the Cayuses they were British (“King George Men”), not “Bostons.”37

The Cayuses put the men to work at the gristmill, grinding corn and wheat. The women sewed and cooked. According to Mary Saunders, eight to ten “young chiefs” came to the mission daily for meals. Three young women, including Lorinda Bewley, were claimed as wives. A total of forty-five people were held captive for a month and then ransomed by Peter Skene Ogden, a Hudson’s Bay Company official from Fort Vancouver, at a cost of sixty-two blankets, sixty-two cotton shirts, twelve muskets, six hundred rounds of ammunition, thirty-seven pounds of tobacco, and some smaller items.³⁸

But that was not the end of the story, or the beginning.