CHAPTER TWO:
THE IMPERIAL TRIBE
This is the country of the Cayouses.
—Narcissa Whitman, October 18, 1836
Roberta Conner was a seventh-grader in the small town of Coulee Dam in north-central Washington when, as far as she can recall, she heard about the “Whitman Massacre” for the first time. It was 1968. The story was a standard unit in the Washington State history curriculum for public school students. It was not something her Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Umatilla relatives ever talked about. The classroom lesson was brief and left her with only a vague impression of martyred missionaries and “murdering Cayuses.” But she remembers reacting to it with a certain skepticism. “It always felt, to me, very peculiar that the only martyrs in history were white people,” she says.1
Conner has devoted much of her professional life to telling more nuanced stories about the indigenous peoples of the Columbia Plateau. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, she was born in 1955 in Salem, Oregon, and grew up mostly in the Pendleton area. When she was thirteen, her Nez Perce grandmother gave her the name Sisaawipam, a Sahaptin word that a linguist told Conner may have had something to do with people coming out of “the cold place”—possibly a reference to the time when glaciers were melting and Ice Age floods were thundering over the Columbia Plateau. She graduated from Pendleton High School in 1973, from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism in 1977, and from Willamette University with a master’s in management in 1984. She worked for an Indian nonprofit in Seattle and for the Small Business Administration in Denver and Sacramento before becoming the founding director of the Tamástslikt (pronounced Tah-MUST-licked) Cultural Institute in 1998. The institute, on the Confederated Tribes’ reservation near Pendleton, is the only tribally owned museum and interpretive center on the Oregon Trail.
A compact woman, about five feet five, Conner has long, gray hair, which she usually wears pulled back from her face, held in place by barrettes or twisted into a French bun. She lives on 352 acres near Pendleton, where she raises horses and enjoys the comings and goings of mice, skunks, hawks, deer, coyotes, and elk, among other creatures. She is thoughtful, articulate, and direct. She also has a personal connection to the Whitman story. Among her ancestors are the first three people to be accepted into a church founded by Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding at Lapwai: James Conner, a mountain man (with a Nez Perce wife) who helped guide the missionaries to Oregon Country; Tuitekes, son of a Cayuse man and a Nez Perce woman, who was given the name Joseph when he was baptized; and Tamootsin, a Nez Perce, baptized as Timothy. Conner points out that of the three, only Timothy remained faithful to the church. James Conner was excommunicated for polygamy, failure to observe the Sabbath, operating a still, and various other transgressions. Joseph, father of the legendary Chief Joseph—whose eloquence in defeat after the Nez Perce War of 1877 made him a national hero—renounced Christianity in 1863, after the federal government reduced the size of the Nez Perce reservation by some six million acres and opened the land to miners and settlers.
Conner doesn’t remember hearing any of her relatives talk about the Whitmans when she was growing up. Not many people publicly admitted to Cayuse heritage. “There was a stigma about being Cayuse,” she commented in 2018. “We were the shame of the region. Only in the last twenty years has it become more common for people to identify as Cayuses.”2 Part of the challenge of telling the story today is that oral traditions were fractured; Indian people who had direct knowledge of what happened wouldn’t talk about it, leaving only a few “threadbare oral histories” and accounts by white people. Still, one thing is certain: “By the time the Whitmans arrived, we had been welcoming strangers here for more than three decades, going back to Lewis and Clark in 1805. There’s a ton of hospitality and generosity that precedes the violence. That’s an imbalance in the story. We had been taking care of these precarious travelers in our homeland for a long time before we killed the Whitmans.”3
The people who became known as Cayuse were given that name by French Canadian fur traders, who called them Cailloux, meaning “Rock People,” because of the rocky nature of parts of their homeland. Fur trader Alexander Ross spelled it Cayouse. To the botanist and explorer David Douglas, they were the Kyeuuse or the Kyuuse. Early emigrants thought they were Cai-uses, Skyuse, Kaius, Kioos, Kiusas, and other variants. Their own name for themselves may have been Liksiyu.4 To their Nez Perce neighbors, they were Weyiiletpuu or Waiilatpu: the People of the Place of Waving Grass (often incorrectly translated as “Place of the Rye Grass”).5
Great Basin wild rye (Leymus cinereus) is one of dozens of native grasses and sedges that flourished on the flatlands and rolling hills in Cayuse country. Ice Age floods shaped much of this landscape, drilling deep crevices into ancient basalt, stripping away topsoil in some areas, piling it up in others, plucking huge chunks of rock from basalt cliffs along the Columbia River, leaving behind shallow caves that Plateau Indians later used for shelter and storage. Geologists believe that the Northwest was pummeled by a hundred or more “mega floods” originating from Glacial Lake Missoula in Montana during the last Ice Age alone. Floodwaters backed up at Wallula Gap, the only outlet for water draining from the entire Columbia Basin to the sea, creating temporary lakes that inundated the Walla Walla Valley alone with up to 250 feet of water. Flood-borne sediments settled out of these lakes, becoming part of the rich topsoil that supports the farms, orchards, and ranches of the Walla Walla, Yakima, and Willamette Valleys today. The sediment is also the basis for the quality of the acclaimed wines produced in the Mid-Columbia Basin. Wine grapes require soil that is both fast-draining and water-retentive, characteristics provided by the fine-grained sand and silt in the flood deposits.
Geologists say that one of those floods, maybe twelve thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, stripped away most of a thick outcropping of basalt downstream from Wallula, leaving two massive pillars that overlook Washington State Route 730, two miles south of US Highway 12. According to a Cayuse legend, the pillars are actually the work of the trickster Coyote. One day, it is said, Coyote saw three beautiful Cayuse sisters building a fish trap in Nch’i-Wána (literally the Big River, now called the Columbia). He tricked them into marrying him. For a while, all was well, but eventually he became jealous of his wives. He turned one of the sisters into a cavern and the other two into basalt pillars on the south side of the river. Then he turned himself into a large rock on the north side, so that he might keep an eye on them forever. Canadian artist Paul Kane saw the pillars and heard the story about the “Rocks of the Ki-use girls” when he passed through the region in July 1847.6 The pillars—shown on maps as the “Cayuse Sisters” or the “Twin Sisters”—still stand sentinel near the river, but the cavern beneath them was inundated by the completion of McNary Dam in 1954.
The Cayuse were the masters of this land when the first whites saw it, in the early 1800s. Their skill in breeding and raising horses (“cayuse” continues to be used as the name of a fast, sure-footed horse in the West) gave them wealth and influence over other indigenous peoples. They were tough, hard-minded traders and much feared as warriors. Scottish-born Alexander Ross, who helped build the area’s first trading post in 1818, described them as “by far the most powerful and warlike” of the tribes on the Columbia Plateau—the region bordered by the Rockies on the east, the Cascades on the west, the Deschutes River drainages to the south, and the Okanogan highlands near the Canadian border to the north. They “regulate all the movements of the others in peace and war, and as they stand well or ill disposed toward their traders, so do the others,” wrote Ross.7 David Douglas, encountering a group of “Kyeuuse” at The Dalles in 1826, called them “the terror of all other tribes west of the mountains.”8 Thomas J. Farnham, a would-be colonizer who traveled through the country a decade later, gave them the label later used by many others: “the imperial tribe” of Old Oregon.9
In earlier days, before horses entered their world, the Cayuse were river people, living in small villages clustered along the Walla Walla, Umatilla, and other drainages south of the Columbia.10 Extended families shared rectangular, A-framed longhouses, held up by driftwood logs and covered with tule mats. Tule (pronounced “too-lee”) is a type of sedge that swells when wet. During winter rains, gaps between water-swollen tules would close, creating a snug, waterproof structure. The lodges were disassembled and reassembled on new sites as needed. People traveled by canoe or on foot. They had dogs but no other domesticated animals. Some of the dogs were trained to haul firewood and other supplies in backpacks or on a travois (a type of sled, framed by two poles in the shape of an isosceles triangle). Like other indigenous people on the Plateau, the Cayuse were seasonally mobile, harvesting wild foods as they became available, following a way of life handed down through generations, over thousands of years.
Cayuse leader Paul Showaway and his daughter in front of their tule lodge at Thorn Hollow winter camp on the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Indian Reservation, 1901. Many Cayuse held on to traditional practices even after being forced onto the reservation. Lee Moorhouse Collection, PHO36_4259, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon, Eugene.
People lived in autonomous villages or bands, bound by language, social customs, and shared purpose. There was no single, politically unified “tribe.” Headmen were selected on the basis of experience and abilities. Conflicts were resolved by a council of elders and headmen; decisions were arrived at by consensus. Women advised but did not directly participate in councils. Polygamy was common, although generally the province of headmen and others with status and influence. There were strong taboos against marrying blood relatives, including cousins, which meant that people often went outside their local communities to find partners. The resulting bonds of kinship created extensive social networks among Plateau peoples.
In the spring, when the salmon began running, people left their winter villages and moved to favorite fishing sites on the Big River. Men used traps, nets, and spears to harvest salmon as they swam upstream to spawn. Women gutted, cleaned, and spread the fish on platforms to dry. Dried fish was a staple in winter, when other food was scarce. Family groups and small bands moved on to other locations as roots, tubers, nuts, berries, and other plants ripened. The diet included more than a hundred species of plants. A mainstay was camas (Camassia quamash), a lily-like bulb that reminded some Euro-Americans of potatoes and others of onions. By late May, camas was in bloom, turning meadows and marshlands into seas of blue. The main harvest began in summer. Women pried the entire plant from the ground, using elkhorns or pointed hardwood sticks; removed the largest bulbs; and replanted the rest, to be harvested again the next year. Camas fields were not farmed in the conventional sense, but they were cultivated, usually by family groups that returned to the same areas year after year. Controlled burns helped reduce weeds and brush. Nutritional studies have shown that camas has more than twice as much calcium and four times as much iron as potatoes and nearly 40 percent more protein per pound than steelhead trout.11
Anthropologist Eugene Hunn has estimated that plant foods provided about 60 percent of the total indigenous diet. Harvesting them required detailed knowledge of the land and its resources and rhythms.12 Places were named after the natural resources found there (as in “Place of Waving Grass” and “Place of Balsamroot Sunflower”), in contrast to the Euro-American convention of putting the names of people on the landscape. This intimate familiarity with the land may have helped the Cayuse see how horses could thrive on the region’s grasslands.
According to oral tradition, the Cayuse acquired their first horses sometime in the 1730s, as a result of what had originally been a war party against the Shoshone (also called Snake) Indians. Approaching a group of Shoshones on a tributary of the Snake River, Cayuse scouts were bewildered to see their enemies riding what appeared to be elk or large deer. Closer investigation revealed that the prints left by the hooves of the mysterious animals were not split, like those of other hooved mammals, but were solid and round. The Cayuse chief arranged a truce and asked to trade for some of the strange creatures. It is said that he and his warriors gave away all they had and returned home, nearly naked, with a mare and a stallion—descendants of horses that had been reintroduced into the New World by the Spanish.
The Cayuse response to those first horses reflected their ability to adapt to changing circumstances and take advantage of new opportunities. People who were hidebound by tradition would not have traded everything they had for something they had never seen before; or, later, be as eager to acquire the guns, metal, cloth, and other new technology offered by Euro-American fur traders; or, still later, be as receptive to the missionaries who showed up in their homeland.
Cayuse herds increased rapidly—a combination of selective breeding (inferior horses were gelded), periodic raids on other tribes, and the abundance of good grazing land. By the early 1800s, an individual who owned only fifteen to twenty horses was considered poor; wealthy families controlled two thousand or more. Cayuse-bred horses were unprepossessing in appearance—they tended to be short and stocky—but they were famed for their speed, endurance, and agility.
Horses led to what historian Theodore Stern has called “a revolution in perspective” for the Cayuse.13 No longer restricted to what they could carry or what their dogs could pull, they moved into new territories, traveling as far east as the Great Plains and as far west as California to hunt, trade, fight, and capture slaves.14 A horse with a travois could easily haul several hundred pounds, much more than a dog. The seasonal migrations now included annual trips across the Rocky Mountains to hunt buffalo. This brought the Cayuse into contact with Midwestern tribes. They soon incorporated elements of Plains culture into their own, adopting new styles of clothing and personal ornamentation, methods of hunting, and ways of packing and transporting goods. They added conical teepees, sometimes covered with buffalo hides, to their housing options, although tule mats remained the covering of choice.
Horses improved the range and effectiveness of war parties, making it possible for the Cayuse to dominate their sedentary neighbors on the Columbia. They claimed suzerainty over The Dalles, the great fishery and trade emporium of the Columbia, forcing the weaker bands in that area to pay them tribute in the form of salmon and other goods. “For years to come,” wrote historians Robert Ruby and John Brown, “they would not let its salmon eaters, teeth worn and eyes blinded by river sand, forget their inferiority.”15 This domination continued into the 1840s. Henry K. W. Perkins, a Methodist missionary at Wascopam, near The Dalles, described the “Kaius” as “the elite of the country.” They “consider the fishers along the river as their humble servants, and there is no end of their acts of injustice and oppression toward them,” he wrote.16
Edward S. Curtis titled this 1909 photograph of a young Cayuse woman on horseback “Holiday Trappings.” The Cayuse have a proud tradition of bedecking themselves and their horses with finery on gala occasions. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis Collection, LC-USZ62-115021.
The increased mobility led to even tighter social and political connections between the Cayuse and Indian peoples throughout the Plateau, especially the Walla Walla, to the north; the Umatilla, to the southwest; and the Nez Perce, whose homeland lay to the east of Cayuse country. Intertribal boundaries were permeable. Combined parties camped together at fishing stations in Cayuse country on the Grande Ronde River or in Nez Perce country on the Wallowa; hunted together; intermarried; spoke each other’s languages; and joined together in raids and war parties, particularly against the Shoshonean tribes to the south. Today, it is rare to find a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla who does not have ancestors from two or three or more tribal groups.17
Over time, the Cayuse became so closely affiliated with the Nez Perce that they lost their original language. Linguists divide the languages of the Plateau into two main families: Sahaptian (spoken by the Nez Perce, Walla Walla, Umatilla, Yakama, and others); and Salishan (spoken by the Flathead, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and others).18 The Cayuse language was an “isolate,” unrelated to either of the major groups. By the early 1800s most Cayuse spoke Nuumiipuutin, the Sahaptin language of the Nez Perce.19 Marcus Whitman noted in 1837 that younger Cayuse did not understand the language of their ancestors at all. A linguist who visited the Confederated Tribes reservation in 1888 found only six people who spoke what has since been designated an extinct language.20
By making it easier to travel, horses greatly expanded the aboriginal trade network that was centered at Celilo Falls, the first of a ten-mile series of cataracts and cascades known collectively as The Dalles of the Columbia, where the river narrowed and squeezed and punched its way through the Cascade Mountains. For thousands of years Indians had gathered to fish, trade, gamble, and socialize at Celilo and adjacent sites. Horses extended the reach of this network, stretching it from Alaska to California and a thousand miles to the east. A dizzying array of goods could be found at what came to be called the Wall Street of the West: buffalo robes, grizzly claws, and parfleches (containers made of rawhide) from the Great Plains; obsidian and pipestone from the Great Basin; parrot feathers and turquoise from the Southwest; whale oil and ornamental shells (including the prized dentalium) from the Pacific coast. Manufactured goods made their way into the interior through coastal trade with European and American ships that came in search of sea otter and other furs. Cloth, metal, beads, and other items from distant factories ended up at the trade marts on the Columbia long before the first white people were seen there.21
It was not just white people’s goods that flowed more freely into the Plateau after the horse revolution, but also their pathogens. Contact or “crowd” diseases such as smallpox and measles evolved along with the earliest civilizations in the Old World. People of European heritage had developed some degree of immunity to contagious diseases through long exposure, but the New World was “virgin soil”—that is, populated by people who had no experience with Old World viruses. The first smallpox pandemic (an epidemic that spreads beyond its initial point of infection) hit the Northwest around 1780. The consensus among anthropologists and ethnobiologists is that it broke out among tribes on the Great Plains and was carried west along trade routes. Historian Elliott West points out that it is not a coincidence that the pandemic occurred after the horse culture was fully established across the West. Earlier outbreaks, before horses, moved so slowly that the contagion burned itself out before reaching fresh populations. In contrast, “travel by hooves got the infection into virgin soil in time to set its horrors loose.”22
It’s not possible to know exactly how many Plateau Indians died during that first pandemic, but anthropologist Robert Boyd has concluded that the mortality rate was at least 30 percent, killing perhaps twenty-five thousand people.23 A second pandemic, a generation later, may have been even more deadly. Drawing from oral histories, accounts by early white observers, and other sources, Boyd estimated that up to 45 percent of the regional population died as a result of smallpox by 1802, leaving only about forty thousand people alive out of a pre-epidemic population of some one hundred eighty thousand.24 If the numbers are uncertain, the impact is clear. Whole villages were wiped out. Communities lost their leaders, their elders, their youngest members. Illness and death were traditionally understood as the result of spiritual transgression. Smallpox cut like a scythe through long-standing ideas about how the world was ordered, creating what Eugene Hunn called “a spiritual apocalypse.”25
Plateau people had not yet had any direct contact with Euro-Americans. They did not associate the devastating new diseases with outsiders. “We had no belief that one Man could give [disease] to another, any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another,” one informant told fur trader David Thompson.26 Instead, they seemed to interpret the epidemics as evidence that relations with the spirit world were out of whack and something drastic was needed to restore balance. Historian Christopher Miller has argued that the epidemics shattered old belief systems and gave rise to “a new thought pattern,” based on prophecies that a powerful supernatural being would soon come to the earth, bringing an end to the world as it was known. But after that, one prophet predicted, “all the spirits of the dead” would be resurrected. “Then things will be made right and there will be much happiness.” As Miller noted, there were remarkable similarities between the apocalyptic visions of the Indian prophets and the millennial preachings of the missionaries who showed up on the Plateau a few decades later.27
A central element in the new Plateau worldview was attributed to a Spokane prophet named Yureerachen (Circling Raven), whose son died of smallpox in 1782. Yureerachen is said to have retreated to a mountaintop after his son’s death, where he had a vision of the coming of “white-skinned ones.”28 When he came down from the mountain, he reportedly proclaimed: “Soon there will come from the rising sun a different kind of men from any you have yet seen, who will bring with them a book, and will teach you everything, and after that the world will fall to pieces.”29 He assured his followers that the men would be friendly and would open the way to a restored and better world. To hasten their arrival, the people were to participate in a ceremony that came to be known as the Prophet Dance. Variations of the Prophet Dance spread across the Plateau, some coinciding with the smallpox epidemic of the 1780s, others appearing after the second epidemic, around 1800.30 What all these prophetic movements seemed to have in common was a belief that a new kind of person would come soon from the east and great changes would follow.
Members of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery were the first “white-skinned ones” to have direct contact with the Cayuse and their neighbors. The expedition (which included Clark’s black slave, York, a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, and her young child) reached Plateau country in October 1805, a month after stumbling, half-starved, out of the Bitterroot Mountains onto the Weippe Prairie. A group of Nez Perce Indians there gave them food and valuable information about the region’s geography, and helped them make canoes for the passage down the Clearwater and Snake Rivers to the Columbia and on to the coast. Two Nez Perce guides accompanied the party downriver. The guides were often sent ahead to announce the group’s approach and prepare for ceremonial meetings. As word spread, hundreds of Indians gathered along the route, curious about the bearded strangers.
On October 18 members of the expedition camped near the mouth of the Walla Walla River, where a delegation of local Indians, probably including Cayuse, greeted them. The explorers’ knowledge of which people they were meeting was not very precise. For one thing, they were in a hurry. For another, they were hearing languages they had never heard before, spoken by people with a tradition of intermarriage and cross-cultural connection. The leader of the group was a man the captains called Yelleppit or Yel-lep-pet. Clark described him as a “Great Chief” and “a bold handsom Indian, with a dignified countenance about 35 years of age, about 5 feet 8 inches high and well perpotiond [sic].” It’s possible he was actually a Cayuse named Ollicutt (also spelled Allowcatt), who had a role in the fur trade a few years later. The word yelépt means “friend, blood brother” in Nez Perce and is similar to a Sahaptin word for “trading partner.” He could have been simply trying to describe his role, not tell the captains his name. What seems clear is that this leader recognized the Americans as potentially valuable partners in trade.31
Yelleppit welcomed the party by sending over a gift of firewood (including dried sagebrush and willow), an important gesture in a virtually treeless land. The next morning, the captains reciprocated by giving him a small medal stamped with a portrait of President Thomas Jefferson, a handkerchief, and a string of wampum (beads made from the shells of East Coast mollusks). Yelleppit tried to persuade the captains to stay for at least another day, “a request that betrayed something more than just native curiosity about whites,” in the words of Lewis and Clark scholar James Ronda. “The chief had his eye on the weapons and goods carried by the explorers.”32 The captains hurried on but promised to return in the spring, on their way back east.
As promised, the expedition returned in late April 1806. Clark marveled at the size and condition of the horse herds grazing on the hillsides as they traveled upriver. “It astonished me to See the order of their horses at this Season of the year,” he wrote, “when I know they had wintered on dry grass of the plains and at the Same time rode with greater Severity than is Common among ourselves. I did not See a Single horse which Could be deemed pore, and maney of them were very fat.”33
They reached Yelleppit’s village, consisting of fifteen large tule mat lodges, on the evening of April 27. The headman told his people to offer the visitors fuel and food. He set an example by personally delivering an armful of wood and a platter of roasted fish. The bargaining began the next morning. Yelleppit opened the session by presenting Clark with “a very eligant white horse.”34 Clark offered his sword in return, along with some musket balls and a little gunpowder. By this point the Americans—who had come as explorers, not traders—had few items left to give to Indians. Yelleppit accepted the gifts and exacted an agreement that the expedition would stay at least another day. That evening, the headman hosted a grand feast and dance. Several hundred Indian men, women, and children attended, including a large contingent of Yakamas from neighboring villages to the north. Clark reported that much of the dancing was led by a shaman who had predicted the coming of people from the east. “We were told [he] was a Medesene man & Could foretell things,” Clark wrote. “That he had told of our Comeing into their Country and was now about to Consult his God the moon if what we Said was the truth &c. &c.”35
The Cayuse, in particular, had reasons for being interested in these powerful strangers. Their herds had multiplied, but they themselves had not. The population was probably not much more than five hundred at the time of first contact with non-Indians.36 Mere accumulation of horses would not be enough to maintain their position of dominance; they needed new sources of power. White people had weapons that far surpassed the power of bows and arrows. They had blankets, beads, kettles, axes, knives, shiny medals, and other goods that not only made daily life more comfortable but also served as a way to display wealth and status. The very fact that white people had access to such wondrous things suggested, as historian Alexandra Harmon put it, that “they had relations with one or more particularly powerful non-mortal beings, and it behooved Indians to learn what they could about those beings and the way to get that power.”37 At least six of the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition could write, making strange marks on paper, a novelty with its own kind of magic. All this made the Cayuse receptive to the next wave of outsiders who came to their country—the fur traders.
The first to arrive was David Thompson, a London-born surveyor, mapmaker, and partner in the Montreal-based North West Company. Thompson was mapping the lower Columbia with a crew of seven other “Nor’Westers” in July 1811 when he met “the Chief of all the Shawpatin Tribes” near the junction of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Thompson didn’t identify him by name, but this “chief” may have been the same man Lewis and Clark called Yelleppit. Thompson thought he was “about forty years of age, say six feet in height, of a mild manly countenance good features and every way a handsome man, clean and well dressed.” As translated by Thompson’s interpreter, the man said his people needed “a Lodge for trading” so they could get guns, steel-tipped arrows, axes, knives, and “many other things which you have and which we very much want.” Thompson promised that such a lodge would be built as soon as the fastest, safest way to deliver the goods could be found. He passed out tobacco and other gifts to seal the deal. He also put up a pole with a British flag and a sign, dated July 9, 1811, basically claiming exclusive rights to the fur trade north of the Columbia on behalf of Great Britain and “the N.W. Company of Merchants from Canada.”38
A group of traders and clerks from John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company found Thompson’s flag and sign about a month later, to their surprise and irritation. Astor had become one of the wealthiest men in America through a business that began with a single fur shop in New York. In 1810 he sent two expeditions to the Northwest—one by ship, the other overland—in an effort to expand his global fur empire. The ship (the Tonquin) left New York in September 1810 and arrived at the mouth of the Columbia six months later, after a voyage that underscored some of the difficulties of supplying distant outposts in the West with manufactured goods from the East. Eight sailors died while trying to guide the Tonquin over the treacherous Columbia Bar, where the great river poured into the sea. Astor’s overland party did not reach the coast until the following spring, after an excruciating journey that took the lives of five men.
The Astorians built a small compound, grandly named Fort Astoria, on the south bank of the Columbia, where the modern city of Astoria, Oregon, is now located. Then they sent a contingent upriver to establish trading relationships with Indians in the interior. The party included Alexander Ross, a twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman who left a job teaching school in Canada to seek his fortune in the fur business. On August 12, Ross and his companions encountered a group of about fifteen hundred Cayuses (“Cajouses,” in his spelling), Nez Perces (“Shaw Haptens”), and Walla Wallas, camped at the mouth of the Walla Walla River. The Indians welcomed the traders with a grand procession: men and women dressed in their finest white deerskins, faces painted, clothing and moccasins richly decorated with beads, porcupine quills, and other ornaments. Ross noticed that the warriors, especially the Cayuse and Nez Perce, carried guns. After the procession the headmen and others of high status sat down with the traders, passed a ceremonial pipe, and gave speeches indicating a wish for peace, friendship, and white men’s goods.39
Two days later, the Astorians found Thompson’s flag, hoisted in the midst of an “immense” assembly of Indians, including some from the Walla Walla encampment. The Indian leaders said Thompson (known to them as “Koo-Koo-Sint,” or “Stargazer”) had given them presents to ensure that the Americans did not trade above the Snake River. However, if the Americans gave them more than Thompson had, they could go where they pleased. The Indians were playing one group of outsiders (soon to be known as “Bostons”) against another (“King George Men”), in a subtle dance born of long experience in intertribal trading.40
The outbreak of war between the United States and Britain in 1812 put an end to John Jacob Astor’s ambitions in the Northwest. He liquidated the Pacific Fur Company in 1813 and sold its assets, including Fort Astoria, to the North West Company. Fort Astoria became Fort George. Many of the Astorians, including Ross, went to work for their former rival. But the long-promised trading post would not be built until 1818, a delay due in part to the theft of a silver goblet.
The goblet was a prize possession of John Clarke, a Pacific Fur Company partner. In late May 1813, Clarke and a dozen or so associates were en route to the coast with a load of furs when they met with a band of “Catatouch” Indians (actually Palouses). A vain, pompous man by all accounts, Clarke kept the goblet in a traveling case and liked to show it off. On this occasion he passed it to the headman, who passed it, like a precious pipe, to other warriors in a ceremonial circle. Everyone admired it. In the morning, however, the silver goblet was gone. Although it was later recovered, Clarke ordered that the suspected thief (who turned out to be a visiting Nez Perce) be hanged. The suspect’s lodge was dismantled and the lodge poles used to make a scaffold in the shape of a tripod. The Indians watched, horrified, as the man was hanged on June 1, 1813. Then they mounted their horses and sped away, to spread the word about what had been done.41
Relationships between the fur traders and all the Sahaptian-speaking people on the Plateau remained tense for several years. At one point Ross and three of his men faced a council of chiefs from the Cayuse, Nez Perce, and four other “warlike” tribes. The Indians assailed the traders as “the men who kill our relations, the people who have caused us to mourn.” An exchange of valued items was a customary way of resolving tensions after an incident non-Indians might classify as murder. In this case, the traders had to give up nearly all the goods they had with them before they were allowed to leave.42
In 1818, Cayuse and Walla Walla leaders granted Ross and his fellow Nor’Wester Donald McKenzie permission to build a post near the mouth of the Walla Walla, but only after extended negotiations. The chiefs demanded, first, that all the assembled Indians be given gifts. Next, they insisted that the traders pay for the timber they needed to build the post. Finally, they asked that the traders not provide any weapons to their enemies.43 Ross distributed tobacco and other gifts, paid for the timber, promised to trade guns only to the Cayuse’s allies, and was allowed to proceed with the construction of what was initially called Fort Nez Percés. The local inhabitants clearly had mixed feelings about having contact with new people who had proven to be dangerous and unpredictable. Alexandra Harmon, writing about the Indians of Puget Sound, made an observation that perhaps applied as well to the Cayuse: “To indigenous people, the King George men and Bostons were in many respects repulsive. Some were unnaturally pale; some had hairy faces…. They spoke languages as incomprehensible as birds’ chirping. Nevertheless, the villagers respected the newcomers’ manifest ability to acquire extraordinary riches and approved their interest in trading.”44
Fort Nez Percés was located on the east bank of a bend in the Columbia, a half-mile above the mouth of the Walla Walla, on a wind-swept, grassy plain. The Columbia at that point was broad and placid, reminding Ross of a lake more than a river. To the south lay “wild hills and rugged bluffs” and “two singular towering rocks”—the basalt pillars known to whites as the Cayuse Sisters (and as Wáatpatukaykas, or Standing for the Spirits Place, to the Cayuse). Horses roamed over the plains; flocks of geese and other fowl flew overhead; salmon and sturgeon ruffled the river. Ross thought the country was “delightful beyond description.”45 But it was also virtually without timber. The crew of ninety-five laborers, sent up from Fort George (the former Astoria), had to travel up to one hundred miles to find wood and raft it back for the fort’s double palisade, storehouse, and interior buildings.
Ross was named chief trader and stayed on in that position even after the North West Company was forced to merge with the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821. The fort, known as Fort Walla Walla after the merger, became one of the most important trading posts in the interior. The shelves held an astonishing array of goods—“wool, flannel, calico, tobacco twists, tea bricks, sugar cones, mouth harps, thimbles, beads, nails, metal cups and kettles, guns, ball and powder, dice, needles, and hats”—in addition to knives and axes.46 The Cayuse initially traded beaver they had caught for these desirable commodities.47 As they trapped out the beaver in their own territory, they became middlemen, obtaining pelts from other Indians (mostly Spokane and Flathead—the Nez Perce thought that hunting small fur-bearing animals was a task suited only for women and slaves). The Cayuse also found a lucrative market for their horses. In the days before a cattle industry was established in Oregon Country, horses were an important source of meat as well as transportation. Records kept by the Hudson’s Bay Company show that more than seven hundred were slaughtered to feed personnel at Fort Walla Walla between 1822 and 1825.48
Three decades after the Spokane prophet predicted the arrival of “a different kind of men from the rising sun,” parts of his prophecy had come true. The fur trade had brought many different kinds of people into Plateau communities, greatly increasing the racial and ethnic diversity. The chief traders were mostly English or Scottish. The labor force included French Canadians, Iroquois, and other eastern Indians, along with Hawaiians (called Kanakas or Owyhees), recruited by ships’ captains on their way to the Northwest coast. Many of the men, including the chief traders, entered into common-law marriages with Indian women. Native wives were invaluable assistants on the frontier. They set up and dismantled camps; collected firewood; gathered roots, berries, and other foods; cooked; cleaned and packed the furs; and made moccasins, snow-shoes, and clothing. They also helped strengthen social ties between the traders and local people. Both the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company accepted and even encouraged these relationships, although there were no priests or ministers to solemnize them in the Euro-American fashion. The traders’ métis (mixed-race) children, connected to two worlds, often grew up bilingual and took on roles as interpreters.
A primary communication tool between these disparate groups was Chinook Jargon, a simple trade argot of about one thousand words, based on the Chinookan spoken by indigenous people on the lower Columbia but including terms from English, French, Nootkan, Russian, and other languages. The grammar was easy to learn. The vocabulary was limited but functional enough for basic commerce. Authorities differ on the origin of the jargon but agree that it was disseminated by the fur trade. Missionaries and settlers would rely on it long after the traders were gone.
The fur trade also introduced elements of Christianity to the Plateau. Members of the eastern Iroquois Confederacy, long exposed to Catholic doctrine, traveled west with the traders, lived with local Indians, and taught them prayers, rituals, and Bible stories. In 1823 the Hudson’s Bay Company mandated that everyone at its forts, including non-Indians, attend Sunday services.49 Rudimentary instruction in western religion was considered useful in promoting “good conduct and right living” among the Indians, and the whites were supposed to model good behavior.50 Many traders were practicing Christians themselves and took their beliefs with them into Indian country. David Thompson and Alexander Ross were both devout Protestants. Pierre Pambrun, a French Canadian who took over as head of Fort Walla Walla in 1832, was an active promoter of Catholic doctrine. Each winter he taught the Lord’s Prayer, translated into Chinook Jargon, to one of the chiefs. The Indians would dance in cadence while the chief chanted the prayer, blending new practices and old rituals.51
John K. Townsend, a young American naturalist who visited a large Cayuse village on the Umatilla River in July 1836, was surprised to learn that Indians there gathered for “divine service” every day at sunrise and again in the evening.52 Narcissa Whitman remarked on the same thing shortly after she and her husband, Marcus, established their mission at “Wieletpoo” a few months later. “The Cayuses as well as the Nez Perces are very strict in attending to their worship which they have regularly every morning at day break & eve at twilight and once on the Sab,” she wrote. “They sing & repeat a form of prayers very devoutly after which the Chief gives them a talk.”53
If parts of the Indian prophecies had come true, others were yet to be fulfilled. For people who were, in scholar Christopher Miller’s words, “looking forward to the end of the world” and its subsequent renewal, the pace must have been frustratingly slow.54 The prophet had spoken of “a book” and men who “will teach you everything.” Perhaps it was a quest for those last two elements that led four Plateau Indians to travel to Saint Louis with an American fur caravan in the fall of 1831. It’s also possible that they undertook the journey for simple economic reasons. The Hudson’s Bay Company had steadily reduced its terms of trade, charging more for what it sold to Indians and paying less for what the Indians offered in trade. The delegates to Saint Louis might have been seeking American traders who could undercut their British competitors. Whatever their actual objectives, the story that eventually began to circulate was that Indians in the West wanted missionaries to come and teach them about “the white man’s Book of Heaven.” It was this “Macedonian cry” (a reference to the Apostle Paul, who dreamed that a stranger asked him to “Come over to Macedonia and help us”) that brought the Whitmans and their fellow missionaries to Oregon Country.
Historian Alvin Josephy has pieced together what little is known about the four men. Their leader was a Nez Perce called Speaking Eagle, about forty-four years old. Traveling with him was Man of the Morning, also in his forties, the son of a Nez Perce buffalo hunter and a Flathead woman. Two young Nez Perces, Rabbit Skin Leggings and Horns Worn Down, both about twenty, completed the group. They all came from an area in present-day Idaho where many people still warmly remembered the 1805 and 1806 visits of Lewis and Clark.55 The travelers arrived in Saint Louis in October 1831 and found their way to the house and office of William Clark, then superintendent for Indian affairs for western tribes.
Clark was in no mood to be gracious to his visitors. The Indian Removal Act, forcing Indians in the southeast to move to land west of the Mississippi River, had been signed into law by President Andrew Jackson just one year earlier. Clark was inundated by Indians protesting the policy. He made only two brief references to the people from the Plateau, whom he mistakenly identified as “Shoshones.” In a report to Lewis Cass, secretary of war, dated November 20, 1831, Clark said he was “surrounded” by hundreds of Indians, “all expecting a satisfactory adjustment of their difficulties,” including some “from west of the Rocky Mountains.”56 In a private letter to Cass a few days later, Clark complained about being “harassed by Indians from different directions” and mentioned in passing that “a deputation of Shoshones are here.”57
The four Indians spoke no English, and Clark understood virtually nothing of their language. They tried to communicate their thoughts with sign language. Before they could make any real progress, the two senior members of the delegation became sick and died. Both were given last rites by a Catholic priest and buried in the Saint Louis parish cemetery.58 The other two travelers stayed until the following spring, when they left Saint Louis on the steamboat Yellowstone. The artist George Catlin was on board and painted their portraits while they traveled up the Missouri toward their homeland. One of them died before they reached the mouth of the Yellowstone River; the other apparently reached home safely but then vanished from the historical record.59
Among the people thronging William Clark’s quarters in the fall of 1831 were six Wyandot Indians from Ohio, a tribe facing forced removal to Kansas. Their spokesman was William Walker. Fifteen months later, Walker wrote a letter to Gabriel P. Disoway of New York City, a major financial backer of the Methodist Missionary Society. The Wyandot party had arrived in Saint Louis shortly after the four Nez Perces. Walker said that he had seen one of the Indians, who was quite ill. He also said Clark had told him the Indians had wanted to get “a book containing directions” about the proper way to worship “the supreme Being.” Disoway sent Walker’s letter to the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, a widely distributed weekly published in New York City by the Methodist Episcopal Church. The paper printed the letter, along with a lengthy and florid elaboration from Disoway, on March 1, 1833. The crux was that “these wandering sons of our native forests” were in desperate need of missionaries who would have “the courage to penetrate into their moral darkness.” A subsequent editorial asked: “Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky Mountains?”60 The Christian Advocate published a number of other enthusiastic and woefully uninformed letters in the following weeks and months. Not one seriously challenged the idea that tens of thousands of Indians in the West were yearning for Christian conversion. “This credulity might seem touching or amusing,” historian Albert Furtwangler observed, “but it soon carried dozens of young men and women into months of hardship, sickness, and frustration, and led many of them and their children into early graves.”61
The first to respond to the call were Methodists: Jason Lee, a tall, black-bearded, thirty-one-year-old minister; his twenty-seven-year-old nephew, Daniel Lee; and three associates. Traveling west with an expedition led by Boston merchant Nathaniel J. Wyeth, they reached a Cayuse village on the Walla Walla River in August 1834. The Cayuse greeted them warmly, gave them horses, and urged them to stay. “The hospitality shown us was worthy of their pretensions as a governing tribe,” Daniel Lee remembered.62 The Methodists, however, moved on and eventually built a mission in the Willamette Valley.
The next year, Rev. Samuel Parker, a Presbyterian, passed through on reconnaissance for the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Again, Cayuse headmen welcomed the stranger. Parker told them he had come to select a site for a mission that would include a school and a “preaching house.” He promised that every year a ship loaded with trade goods would arrive, and the contents would be divided among the Indians as payment for the use of their land. This promise would prove to have serious repercussions in years to come, after the Cayuse welcomed the Whitmans into their realm and waited for payments that never came.