CHAPTER FOUR:
DESTINATION OREGON

Never send another mission over these mountains if you value life and money.

—Henry Spalding to David Greene, July 8, 1836

I see no reason to regret our choice of a journey by land.

—Marcus Whitman to David Greene, July 16, 1836

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman left Angelica on the morning of February 19, 1836, one day after their wedding. It was the beginning of a journey that would take them far beyond the world they had known—beyond friends and family; beyond amenities such as daily postal service and readily available books and newspapers; beyond towns, well-traveled roads, schools, shops, and churches filled with the like-minded. Henry and Eliza Spalding had begun their own journey a few days earlier. The two couples would meet in Cincinnati in mid-March and proceed from there to Oregon Country, some three thousand miles and seven months of hard travel away. It was a daunting and dangerous trip, from one coast to the other, across formidable mountains and undammed rivers; a trip never before attempted by white women and completed by relatively few men.

A deep sense of purpose gave these missionaries the courage, and the hubris, to trade familiar comforts for an uncertain future. They were driven by the belief that they had a divine mandate to “save the heathen.” Eliza Spalding put it this way, in a diary entry after a painful farewell to her family: “I trust that it is the love of Christ which has constrained me to break away from the fond embrace of parents, brothers and sisters, and made me, not only willing, but anxious to spend and be spent in laboring to promote my Master’s cause among the benighted Indians.”1

The weather was cold and snowy. Whitman hired a private sleigh to take him and Narcissa to Ithaca (about one hundred miles east), where they retrieved “John,” one of the two Nez Perce boys he had brought back from the rendezvous the year before. The other boy, “Richard,” had stayed with one of Whitman’s brothers in Rushville. After returning to Rushville from Ithaca, Narcissa had a “pair of Gentleman’s boots” made for her in the Whitman family’s shoe shop. After a few days of final goodbyes, they left with the two boys and traveled some three hundred miles south to Pittsburgh, where they boarded the steamboat Siam, bound for Cincinnati on the Ohio River. At the suggestion of her mother, Narcissa began keeping a travel diary. “We left Pittsburgh this morning at ten o’clock and are sailing at the rate of thirteen miles an hour,” she wrote on March 15, 1836, in her first entry. “It is delightful passing so rapidly down the waters of the beautiful river.” She enjoyed the “imposing scene” created by the parade of “stately” steamboats on the river, the “agreeable” motion of the Siam, and the pleasures of a private stateroom, “where we can be as retired as we wish.”2

The Spaldings were waiting when the Whitmans and their wards arrived in Cincinnati on March 17. The two couples spent several days there together, making travel arrangements and looking for last-minute recruits for the Oregon Mission. Narcissa noted that “our two Indian youth attracted the gaze and admiration” of Cincinnati’s “disciples of Jesus,” but “our expectations were not realized”—they could find no one willing to join them on “our journey into the wilderness.”3

Neither Narcissa nor Eliza—who met for the first time in Cincinnati—recorded their initial impressions of the other. Eliza made a bland reference on March 22, when she wrote “To day we leave Cincinnati in Company with Dr. and Mrs. Whitman, who are to be associated with us in laboring to erect the standard of the cross on heathen ground…. May God bless us in our intercourse with each other.” Narcissa did not write anything about Eliza until nearly a month after she had met her, and then it was mostly in the context of comparing her health with that of the other woman’s. “My health was never better than since I have been on the river,” she wrote on April 7. “I think I shall endure the journey well—perhaps better than any of the rest of us. Mrs. Spalding does not look nor feel quite healthy enough for our enterprise.” After more comments on her own well-being, Narcissa added this about Eliza: “I like her very much. She wears well upon acquaintance. She is a very suitable person for Mr. Spalding—has the right temperament to match him. I think we shall get along very well together; we have so far.”4

In Cincinnati the party boarded another steamboat for the 270 or so nautical miles up the Mississippi River to Saint Louis, the last large town on the frontier. Spalding boasted, in a report to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, that he had obtained passage for the entire group of six, including food for a voyage that was expected to last about a week, for only $95. “It seems to me now that we are on the very borders of civilization,” Narcissa wrote on March 30. If she had any fears or second thoughts about what lay ahead, she did not express them. Instead, she struck a positive note: “I have not one feeling of regret at the step which I have taken, but count it a privilege to go forth in the name of my Master, cheerfully bearing the toil and privation that we expect to encounter.” Narcissa was writing for an audience she knew would include her family, friends, and neighbors. She may have deliberately struck an upbeat tone to reassure people back home and encourage at least some to come west too.5 Eliza’s words were more introspective—intended for self-reflection rather than for an audience. Yet she too seemed undaunted. “The waters of the grand Ohio are rapidly bearing me away from all I hold dear in this life,” she wrote, a few days after leaving Cincinnati. “Yet I am happy; the hope of spending the remnant of my days among the heathen, for the express purpose of pointing them to ‘the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world,’ affords me much happiness.”6

The missionaries hoped to reach Saint Louis by Sunday, March 27, but they were still eighty-five miles away that morning. They insisted they could not violate the biblical commandment to rest on the Sabbath. There would be times, in the months to come, when they would have to travel on Sundays or be left behind in wild country, but in this case they asked to be put ashore. The captain of the Junius let them off at the small riverfront town of Chester, Illinois. They spent the day with an elderly minister and his small flock. On Monday another steamboat, the Majestic, arrived unexpectedly; they boarded and continued on to Saint Louis.

Like other steamboats of its era, the Majestic had tall, twin smokestacks; an upper deck with staterooms that could accommodate up to 150 passengers; a lower deck for those who couldn’t afford a private sleeping room; galleries for strolling on the upper deck; and a richly decorated saloon (the main reception area, also used as a dining hall). The Whitmans and the Spaldings each had spacious staterooms. The two Nez Perce boys slept on the lower deck. The boat offered a degree of luxury that none of these passengers had experienced before, but Narcissa was the only one to comment on it. “Since we came on board we have come on very pleasantly, our accommodations are better here than on any previous boat,” she wrote. The amenities included “excellent cooks” and “servants who stand at our elbows ready to supply every want.” Steamboat travel also meant enforced leisure. Narcissa took advantage of it by drinking in the “beautiful landscapes” that fringed the river, “on the one side high and rugged bluffs, and on the other low plains.”7

The party arrived in Saint Louis on March 29. A letter from the War Department was waiting for Whitman and Spalding, granting them official permission “to reside in the Indian country among the Flat Head & Nez Percés Indians.” Their wives were not mentioned. Narcissa had hoped that some letters from home would be delivered to her in Saint Louis and was disappointed that there were none. “Why have they not written, seeing it is the very last, last time they will have to cheer my heart with intelligence from home, home, sweet home, and the friends I love,” she wrote, adding: “But I am not sad. My health is good. My mind completely occupied with present duty and passing events.”8

Saint Louis in 1836 was a bustling, polyglot community of some fourteen thousand people, about 20 percent of whom were slaves. It would have been impossible for visitors to ignore the imprint of slavery on the city’s landscape. Slave auctions were held regularly on the steps of the county courthouse and at other sites along the busiest streets, in full view of passersby. Newspaper advertisements seeking the return of runaway slaves or offering slaves for sale or hire were commonplace. Businesses or individuals could “rent” slaves with specific skills such as printing, blacksmithing, or carpentry. Many slaves worked on steamboats as crew, or on the riverfront as laborers. The Whitmans and Spaldings were members of churches that were at least nominally abolitionist (and both Henry and Eliza had been students at Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary when it was headed by Lyman Beecher, an incendiary abolitionist), but apparently none of them had any direct contact with slavery until they reached Saint Louis. Myra Eells, who traveled the same route two years later as part of a group sent out to “reinforce” the Oregon Mission, was horrified to find that the chambermaid on their steamship was a slave owned by the captain. “To-day have my feelings moved almost to indignation on account of the wretchedness of slavery,” she wrote.9 The Whitmans and Spaldings left no record of their reaction to the slaves in Saint Louis, or elsewhere.

Both couples visited the newly constructed Saint Louis Cathedral, with a mix of curiosity and revulsion. To evangelical Protestants in the mid-nineteenth century, Catholicism represented the seat of evil. Priests were “emissaries of the man of sin” (the Pope, who, in turn, was an emissary of the devil).10 The Spaldings had been out for a walk along the riverfront, heard the cathedral bells ringing, and stepped inside for a brief look. Eliza recorded her reaction: “the unpleasant sensations we experienced on witnessing the heartless forms and ceremonies, induced us soon to leave, rejoicing that we had never been left to embrace such delusions.” Eliza wasn’t much impressed with Saint Louis as a whole. “Arrived at this city last evening—am not pleased with its appearance, particularly the part which is occupied by the French,” she wrote. “The buildings are not splendid, many of them are uncouthly constructed, and it has the appearance of a city going to decay.”11

From Saint Louis the party booked passage on yet another steamboat, the Chariton, for a week-long, three-hundred-mile trip to Liberty, Missouri, near present-day Kansas City. This was close to the halfway point between their homes in the East and their final destination in Oregon Country. So far, they had traveled in relative ease on riverboats. Ahead of them lay a tedious slog through eighteen hundred miles of prairie, mountain, and desert. “My mind is free from anxiety respecting the ardous [sic] journey we have in view,” Eliza wrote on April 1, 1836, as the boat steamed away from Saint Louis. She found refuge in her faith: “The promises of God are sufficient to calm and console the heart that is stayed on Him.” Spalding, meanwhile, convinced the captain of the Chariton to reduce the party’s fare, from $180 to $100—a sum that included three meals a day for six people for a week.12

En route, on the Missouri River just north of Saint Louis, they passed the wreck of the Siam, the boat that had carried the Whitmans and their wards from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. It had hit a snag and sunk. No lives were lost, but Narcissa was sobered by the “melancholy sight.” It was a reminder that riverboats, for all their conveniences, were vulnerable to snags, sandbars, fires, explosions, and collisions—some of them caused by the bravado of foolhardy captains. The Whitmans had witnessed one near-collision, as passengers on the Siam, when their captain attempted to pass another in a race. His rival “shot into our path before us,” Narcissa wrote, and a crash seemed inevitable, “but we passed her unhurt.”13

The Whitman/Spalding party spent more than three weeks in Liberty—much longer than expected. During that time they acquired the equipment, supplies, and livestock needed both for their trip and for the new homes they intended to establish in the West. The men bought a sturdy farm wagon, a dozen horses, six mules, seventeen cattle, four milk cows, and two calves; life preservers made of India rubber, for a measure of safety when crossing rivers; tools, furniture, clothing, blankets; barrels of flour; and other provisions. Eliza and Narcissa sewed a large conical tent out of “bedticking” (heavy cotton cloth that had been oiled, to make it somewhat water resistant). The tent would be raised with a center pole, the sides fastened down with pegs. The bill for all these supplies came to $3,063.96 (about $70,800 today). They had already spent $2,800 (about $65,000) just getting to Liberty.14 The secretaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions would not be pleased by the size of these bills when they received them in Boston.

Among the purchases were two sidesaddles for Eliza and Narcissa. Riding astride was a breach of decorum for women of their backgrounds. Sidesaddles were uncomfortable and insecure but protected the riders’ sense of propriety. The women rode with both legs positioned on the left side of the horse, the left foot in a single stirrup while the right leg rested on a pommel, the torso twisted to face forward. Eliza, a more tentative rider than Narcissa, ended up being thrown several times when her horse suddenly bolted or jumped to one side.15

During the early weeks of the journey, the women (and, at times, the men too) rode in the light wagon that had been a gift from Eliza’s father. The wagon, based on a design attributed to a Revolutionary War general named Henry Dearborn, had a flat top and side curtains and could be pulled by one horse. It had no springs, but the passengers sat on baggage and blankets and found it comfortable enough, at least when moving over relatively level ground. Riding in it over rough terrain was a spine-jolting experience. The farm wagon would eventually be abandoned and the Dearborn wagon broken down to a two-wheeled cart. Even so, it would become the first wheeled vehicle to be taken over the Rockies and as far west as Fort Boise, a Hudson’s Bay post on the Snake River—a feat many had doubted would be possible.

Before leaving Liberty, the missionary party was joined by a carpenter, William Henry Gray, from Utica, New York, appointed a “lay member” of the Oregon Mission by the American Board; a third Nez Perce youth, whom they called Samuel Temoni; and two young would-be mountain men. One of them is known to history only by his last name, Dulin. The other was Miles Goodyear, a redheaded nineteen-year-old from Connecticut who would later become one of the first white settlers in Utah. Dulin and Goodyear were hired to help drive the livestock to Oregon Country. At times the tent that Narcissa and Eliza had sewn would provide shelter, if not privacy, for all ten of these people.


Whitman had made arrangements with the American Fur Company to travel with its annual caravan to the Rocky Mountain rendezvous, to be held that year on a branch of the Green River in Wyoming. The rendezvous was a combination trade fair and bacchanal. Traders, trappers, mountain men, Indians, and hangers-on came together to sell furs, buy supplies, play games, race horses, gamble, fight, drink, and carouse—not a typical environment for the pious. But the missionaries did not believe it would be safe for them to cross through Indian country on the Great Plains without the company’s protection. They planned to join the caravan at the Missouri River Indian Agency’s trading post at Bellevue, in the southeast corner of what is now Nebraska. Spalding, the three Nez Perces, and the two hired hands left Liberty on April 27 to travel overland to the trading post, 175 miles to the north, with the wagons and livestock. A fur company boat was supposed to pick up Whitman and the women and take them to Bellevue. But when the boat appeared in Liberty, on May 1, the captain refused to stop. Whitman had to hire a wagon and driver and rush to catch up, first with Spalding and then with the caravan.16

The ten-person Whitman/Spalding party was reunited in mid-May, but by that point the caravan had already left Bellevue. Thomas Fitzpatrick, its leader, didn’t mind having missionaries tag along, but he would not wait for them. The party was already about a week and 120 miles behind the caravan. Among the obstacles they faced was the Platte River, a mile-wide braid of shallow, stagnant pools separated by mudflats and sandbars. Its main channel snaked erratically from bank to bank. The channel was only a few feet deep, but the current was swift and the bottom swampy. It took two days to reach the crossing point, and another two days to get the wagons, baggage, and livestock from the south side of the Platte to the north.

Spalding and Whitman were both physically drained by the effort but the missionaries hurried on, past Bellevue to a Baptist-run mission near a village of Otoe Indians. The need for speed was so great that they even traveled on a Sunday, violating both their deeply held convictions and a key directive from the American Board that they strictly observe the Sabbath as a sacred day of rest. They jettisoned some of their baggage, leaving it behind at the mission. “Though we have now a very limited supply of everything we find that we must leave many things we consider almost indispensable,” Spalding wrote to David Greene, secretary of the American Board. “My classical and theological books will nearly all be left. We can take almost nothing in the line of mechanical tools and farming utensils.”17 Rev. John Dunbar, one of the missionaries at the Otoe station, agreed to help them intercept the fur company. The route was fairly level, but it involved crossing two more rivers. After several forced marches, the Whitman/Spalding party finally reached the caravan, at 1:00 a.m. on May 26. “Ourselves and animals very much fatigued,” wrote Eliza.18

The caravan that year was a particularly large one. Narcissa called it “a moving village.”19 In addition to some seventy men, it included nearly four hundred horses and mules and seven large wagons loaded with supplies, each pulled by a six-mule team. Once under way, the caravan stretched for about a mile. The missionary party brought up the rear: the Spaldings and Whitmans in one wagon, Gray and the baggage in the other, the Indian boys and the hired men on horseback, driving the cattle and other livestock. Everybody followed the same schedule: up at 3:30 a.m.; load the wagons and the packhorses; be on the move by daybreak; stop for dinner at 11:00; start again at 1:00 p.m.; camp at 5:00 p.m.; unload the wagons and animals; prepare, eat, and clean up after the evening meal; picket the horses and mules; and do it all again the next day, seven days a week. The missionaries would not have a Sunday of rest for six weeks.

The trail followed the broad, muddy, meandering Platte across the Nebraska prairies. Daytime temperatures were pleasant and there was plenty of grass for the livestock, but the river bottomlands were boggy enough to force the company to detour to higher ground at times. Timber was scarce; the only source of fuel for cooking was dried buffalo dung. The travelers’ diet now consisted mostly of buffalo meat (supplied by the caravan’s hunters), supplemented with milk from the missionaries’ cows. (Rev. Asa B. Smith, one of the missionaries who came to Oregon in 1838, observed that “buffalo meat produces very fragrant diarrhea which debilitates the system & for the time renders an individual very uncomfortable.”20) Most of the flour they had bought in Liberty had been used up; the little that remained was being saved to thicken broth. They all would come to yearn for a taste of bread. Despite the hardships, Narcissa—who kept the most complete of the missionary accounts of the trip—seemed to relish the experience. “I never was so contented and happy before neither have I enjoyed such health for years,” she wrote.21

In contrast, Eliza, who may have been suffering from tuberculosis as well as the aftereffects of a difficult stillbirth, began to wonder if she would die on the trail. She could not tolerate the buffalo diet and grew weaker as the days and weeks passed. One time, when her horse bolted, her foot caught in her sidesaddle’s single stirrup and her body was dragged for several yards over rough ground. She almost drowned while crossing one river channel, when a strong current nearly swept her from the back of her horse. “We are now 2,800 miles from my dear parent’s dwelling, expecting in a few days to commence ascending the Rocky Mts,” she wrote from Fort William (later Fort Laramie), a fur trading post in present-day Wyoming. “Only He who knows all things, knows whether this debilitated frame will survive the undertaking. His will, not mine, be done.” Still, Eliza found time to enjoy the quiet beauty of the landscape. “The majestic sand bluffs and the extensive plains between the bluffs and river, covered with beautiful flowers and roses, presents a delightful scenery to the eye of the traveler,” she wrote.22

Fort William, at the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie Rivers, was a convenient resting place for fur brigades and, later, for travelers on what became the Oregon Trail. It was established in 1834 by Kentucky-born mountain man William Sublette and his partner, Robert Campbell. The beaver trade was already in decline by then, but the post’s location, in the heart of buffalo country, made it the center of a flourishing trade in buffalo skins. The ambitiously named “fort” was only eighty feet wide and one hundred feet long, surrounded by a fifteen-foot-tall palisade. Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Plains Indians camped on the grasslands outside the fort in great numbers during the summer trading season. The only visual record of Fort William, a painting by the American artist Alfred Jacob Miller in 1837, shows it surrounded by teepees, seemingly stretching off for miles.

The caravan arrived at the fort on June 13 and stayed for eight days, a period that included what Eliza described as “the first Sabbath we have spent in quietness and rest since the 8th of May.” She noted that it had been several weeks since they had seen a building of any kind; she found it “very pleasant to fix my eyes once more upon a few buildings.”23 The animals were turned loose to graze and regain strength before the long haul over the mountains. All the large wagons, including Whitman’s farm wagon, were unloaded. Most of the contents were repacked onto mules and horses; the fur company’s leftovers were piled into a two-wheeled cart. The heavy wagons would remain at the fort until the traders returned in the fall, when they would be reloaded with furs and buffalo skins and driven back to Saint Louis. Whitman’s experiences the year before had convinced him that Spalding’s light wagon could be driven at least as far as the rendezvous, if not farther. When the caravan began moving again, that wagon was in the rear.

The missionaries camped outside the fort but visited frequently. They enjoyed the novelty of sitting on chairs with seats made of buffalo skins, a comfort compared to saddles and wagon seats. One day, they were served “mountain bread”—thick pancakes made of coarse flour and water and fried in buffalo grease. Eating anything made with flour was a treat. The women washed clothes for the first time since leaving Liberty. During this sojourn Narcissa became pregnant. She would fight nausea and increasing discomfort as her pregnancy progressed, but at least it meant an end to the challenges associated with menstruation, including finding the time and privacy to change and wash the rags used to catch menstrual flow.

From Fort William the caravan followed the North Platte River to its confluence with the Sweetwater, near today’s Casper, Wyoming. They passed several Pawnee villages. Narcissa and Eliza were the first white women most of these Indians had ever seen. “We, especially, were visited by them both at noon and at night; we ladies were such a curiosity to them,” Narcissa wrote. “They would come in and stand around our tent, peep in, and grin in their astonishment to see such looking objects.”24


It was late June 1836, on the high plains. The soil was thinner, the grass more sparse. “Our Animals have sufered [sic] much for want of grass [and] from forced traveling,” Whitman reported.25 There had been no rain for weeks. The missionaries discovered what it meant to be at the end of a mile-long brigade in dry country. Men in the fur company rotated positions, so that everyone got an equal chance to be at the front and away from the clouds of dust churned up by the animals. But the missionary party was consigned to the rear all the way to the rendezvous.

They found it challenging to keep up during the long climb from the river valleys to South Pass, the lowest (at 7,412 feet elevation) and broadest passageway over the Continental Divide. Spalding’s wagon was slower and more cumbersome than the fur company’s pack mules and cart. No one was in a celebratory mood on July 4, when they reached the pass. “Crossed a ridge of land today; called the divide, which separates the waters that flow into the Atlantic from those that flow into the Pacific,” Eliza wrote in her diary that day.26 She showed no sign of excitement at having just become one of the first two white women to cross the Rocky Mountains. None of the other missionaries mentioned the milestone or the significance of the date at all. As far as they were concerned, it was just another day of grinding travel.

An entirely fictive version of what happened that day began to circulate decades later, the result of a collaboration between a then elderly Henry Spalding and Rev. Simon J. Humphrey, district secretary of the American Board in Chicago and the editor of a weekly Congregationalist newspaper called The Advance. It’s hard to say how much of the story sprang wholly from Spalding’s imagination and how much was embellished by Humphrey. The gist of it, published in The Advance on December 1, 1870, was this: when they reached the summit, the missionaries, “alighting from their horses and kneeling on the other half of the continent, with the Bible in one hand and the American flag in the other, took possession of it as the home of American mothers, and of the Church of Christ.”27

The invented scene was woven into the Whitman legend that coalesced in 1897, the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on the mission. The Ladies Home Journal illustrated it with a drawing that showed Whitman standing in front of his kneeling comrades, one hand holding an American flag in full billow atop a tall pole, a Bible open on the ground in front of him, two buckskin-clad Indian boys looking on. The artist dressed Whitman in a morning coat, with tails, and a cravat. The women looked as if they had just stepped out of church. The drawing was widely reprinted after its initial publication in November 1897 in a Ladies Home Journal hagiography titled “When Dr. Whitman Added Three Stars to Our Flag: How Oregon Was Saved for the Union.”28 A variation, first published in Whitman’s Ride through Savage Lands (1905), had Whitman wearing a white buccaneer shirt, kneeling, arms outstretched while the flag waved from a pole anchored in the ground behind him.29 The missionaries took neither flag nor flagpole with them to Oregon. Nonetheless, the idea that they had celebrated Independence Day by planting the flag and laying claim to the West in the name of their God, like New World explorers armed with a monarch’s banner, persisted for decades.

About two hundred trappers and traders and perhaps a thousand Indians were camped at the Green River when the caravan arrived on July 6, 1836. The presence of two white women created something of a sensation. “Arrived at the Rendezvous this evening, were met by a large party of Nez Perces, men, women and children,” Eliza wrote. “The women were not satisfied, short of saluting Mrs. W. and my self with a kiss. All appear happy to see us.”30 The Indians, Whitman reported, were “greatly interested with our females, cattle, and waggon [sic].”31 Narcissa’s blond hair attracted particular attention. The reception by “the gazing throng” was “unexpected and affected me very much,” she wrote.32

The fur company took over a crude shelter that had been erected at the Green River site in 1832 by Capt. Benjamin Bonneville, a French-born Army officer and explorer. The missionaries set up camp to the east of “Fort Bonneville.” Most of the trappers and hunters camped to the west. Various bands of Indians stretched out for miles to the south. The two white women were “besieged with visitors, both civilized and savage,” according to mountain man (and eventual marshal of Oregon Territory) Joe Meek.33 Narcissa was not as curious about the Indians as they were about her. She was far more interested in what William Henry Gray caustically called “gentlemen callers,” from rough-hewn trappers like Meek to Sir William Drummond Stewart, a Scottish nobleman and adventurer. (Stewart was on the third of his four trips to the rendezvous.) Eliza, in contrast, “showed but little attention to any one except the natives and their wives,” Gray wrote.34 She concentrated on learning the Nez Perce language, the lingua franca among tribes at the gathering, and made much more progress with it than any of her colleagues.

Among the visitors to the missionary camp was Nathaniel Wyeth, the Boston businessman who had led two overland expeditions to Oregon Country in hopes of establishing a fur and fish trading empire. Defeated, he was returning to New England. He agreed to take letters from the missionaries with him, including the first part of what Narcissa called “something of a journal.”35 She did not have a bound diary or journal and wrote instead on individual sheets of thin paper, eight inches wide and thirteen inches long, folded into quarters for mailing. She used a metal pen point, and mixed ink from powder and water as needed. Part of one of the outside sheets was left blank for the address (envelopes had not yet been invented). Postage was paid by the recipient, based on the number of sheets and their weight. To save postage and paper, Narcissa wrote to the very edges of each sheet, with no margins, her handwriting getting smaller and more cramped as she came to the end. This packet reached Angelica on November 5, 1836—four months after being entrusted to Wyeth.

The missionaries stayed at the rendezvous for a week and a half. At some point they became acquainted with a man identified only as “Hinds, a colored man.” He may have been a trapper or a mountain man. In poor health, he may have thought there were advantages to being close to a physician. In any case, he joined the missionary party as a hired hand. Dulin, one of the two young men who had traveled with the group from Missouri, left for parts unknown. “Richard” and “John” were briefly reunited with some of their Nez Perce relatives. The two youths had learned enough English to be useful as interpreters, and Whitman asked that they remain with the missionaries, at least for the rest of the journey.

Samuel Parker, the fiery preacher from Ithaca who was supposed to be waiting for Whitman and the others at the rendezvous and escort them into Oregon, did not show up. Instead, he sent word that he was too worn out to continue and was at Fort Vancouver, waiting to sail on a Hudson’s Bay Company ship for Hawaii. He planned to go on from there back to New York on an American merchant ship via Cape Horn—a challenging voyage but still easier than crossing the continent by land. Parker’s defection was a bitter disappointment for Whitman. In a letter to the American Board, he complained that Parker had not only failed to meet him at the rendezvous, he had “neglected to write a single letter containing any information concerning the country, company, Indians, prospects, or advice of any kind whatever.”36

Without Parker the missionaries didn’t have a guide for the rest of the journey. They were debating what to do when a small brigade of Hudson’s Bay men rode into the rendezvous on July 12. To the missionaries’ great relief, the leaders, Thomas McKay and John L. McLeod, graciously offered to escort them at least as far as Fort Walla Walla. “It seems the most marked Providence in our favour, of any we have yet experienced,” Henry Spalding wrote.37 On July 14 the mission party moved to the McKay/McLeod camp, about ten miles to the west. A group of about two hundred Nez Perces and Flatheads came too. They had decided to accompany the brigade to Fort Hall, a trading post on the Snake River near present-day Pocatello. The entire expedition—traders, missionaries, and Indians—set off five days later.


The missionaries now faced the most difficult part of their overland journey: more than eight hundred miles of sun-scorched sagebrush, desert canyons, wild rivers, and mountains. The pace was slow, averaging only twelve or thirteen miles a day. The heat was oppressive, the mosquitoes maddening, the tedium mind-numbing. The men suffered as much, if not more, than the women. Whitman became “so lame with the rheumatism as to be scarcely able to move.”38 Spalding fainted twice from heat and exhaustion. Gray, the carpenter from Utica, was so weak and debilitated that at one point he begged to be left for dead. The trail seemed a vast, gritty oven. They were all heartily sick of the monotonous diet. “Have been living on fresh meat for two months exclusively,” Narcissa wrote on July 23. “Am cloyed with it. I do not know how I shall endure this part of the journey.” Four days later, they had no fresh meat and were eating dried buffalo jerky instead. “I can scarcely eat it, it appears so filthy, but it will keep us alive, and we ought to be thankful for it,” wrote Narcissa, sounding not very thankful at all.39

Adding to the travails was the trouble-plagued wagon. It got stuck in creeks, sometimes tipped over on steep trails, and broke down repeatedly. Whitman and Spalding exhausted themselves trying to get it over terrain that no wheels had ever crossed. When one of the axles broke, the women “rejoiced, for we were in hopes they would leave it, and have no more trouble with it,” Narcissa wrote, adding: “Our rejoicing was in vain for they are making a cart of the back wheels, this afternoon, and lashing the fore wheels to it—intending to take it through in some shape or other.”40

They stumbled into Fort Hall on August 3. The post (one of two established by Nathaniel Wyeth) was smaller and more rustic than Fort William, but, as Narcissa commented, “anything that looks like a house makes us glad.”41 Joseph Thing, one of Wyeth’s men, welcomed the party with a longed-for taste of bread, along with some turnips and stewed serviceberries. Miles Goodyear, the nineteen-year-old from Connecticut who had helped drive the cattle from Missouri, decamped at this point, partly out of frustration with the wagon. He “was determined, if the Doctor took his wagon any further, to leave the company.” In his parting words, Goodyear said he “did not care for missionaries, Hudson’s Bay men, nor Indians.”42 Most of the Nez Perce also left, heading north. McKay, McLeod, and the missionary party spent a day and a half at the fort, then moved on, following the Snake River across the deserts of what is now southern Idaho, in the searing heat of August.

The men dragged and pushed the wagon over and around sagebrush that grew in stiff, hard bunches, in some places as tall as “the height of a man’s head.” In swampy areas along the river, “we were so swarmed with musquetoes [sic] as to be scarcely about to see,” Narcissa wrote.43 It seemed as if the cows would be driven mad by the insects. Eliza’s horse stepped into a wasp nest and threw her violently, head first, to the ground. She didn’t break any bones but had to be carried in what was left of the wagon for the next few days. In mid-August, at a Snake River crossing near today’s Glenn’s Ferry, the wagon was completely overturned by strong currents. The two mules that were pulling it were tangled in their harnesses and came close to drowning before they could be cut loose. Everything that had been packed in the wagon was thoroughly soaked. Finally, at Fort Boise (also called Snake Fort), a Hudson’s Bay post on today’s Idaho-Oregon border, Whitman and Spalding gave up and stowed the makeshift vehicle at the fort. Thomas J. Farnham, a would-be colonizer who led a group of settlers to Oregon in 1839, saw the remnants when he passed through that year. They consisted of the four wheels, the axle, and not much more.

The party spent three days at Fort Boise, a welcome respite. The women washed clothing; the men repacked. In addition to the cart, they left behind five ailing cattle, hoping to obtain replacements at the next major trading post on their route, Fort Walla Walla. Once again they were able to get fresh game, along with waterfowl and fish and, as they continued west, various kinds of berries. Grazing improved, but the missionaries’ mules, horses, and cattle were too worn out to travel very quickly. The party split in two. McLeod and his men, with the Whitmans and Gray, pushed on ahead. The Spaldings and Whitmans’ Nez Perce wards followed, with two Indian guides, the pack animals, baggage, and the remaining twelve head of cattle.

Approaching the Grande Ronde Valley and the Blue Mountains beyond, Narcissa was reminded of the hills around her native Steuben County, New York. She noticed familiar-looking trees and flowers and “was not a little delighted.” But this pleasant interlude didn’t last long. “Before noon,” she wrote, “we began to descend one of the most terrible mountains for steepness & length I have yet seen.” In some places the descent was almost perpendicular. Shards of broken rock littered the trail, lacerating the horses’ hooves. It took most of a day to travel a two-mile, up-and-down course over the Blue Mountains to a spot overlooking the Columbia River Valley. By then it was sunset, but there was enough light to provide distant views of Mount Hood, about three hundred miles to the west, and Mount Saint Helens, to the northwest. It was, Narcissa wrote, “enchanting & quite diverted my mind from the fatigue under which I was labouring.”44 Gray too was charmed by the “sublimely Grand” scene, and “for a moment…forgot the toiles [sic] of the day.”45

The Whitmans and Gray arrived at Fort Walla Walla on September 1. The Spaldings came in two days later. They were greeted by Pierre C. Pambrun, chief trader at the fort, and John K. Townsend, a physician and naturalist from Philadelphia. Townsend, who had come to Oregon Country in 1834 with Nathaniel Wyeth, was based at Fort Vancouver but took frequent trips around the region to collect specimens. Whitman had met members of Townsend’s family in Philadelphia and brought him a packet of letters—the first news Townsend had received from home in two years. Narcissa would wait even longer than that before receiving any letters from her family. The “long, long silence” would make her feel increasingly isolated and despondent.46

Townsend thought that the missionaries “appear admirably qualified for the arduous duty to which they have devoted themselves, their minds being fully alive to the mortifications and trials incident to a residence among wild Indians.” He observed that “the ladies have borne the journey astonishingly; they look robust and healthy.”47 Gray also commented on how well the women had endured the trip. “Mrs Spaldings health and strength is improved beyond all expectation,” he wrote to friends in the East. “Mrs. Whitman has indured [sic] the Journey like a heroine.”48 News that the two women had crossed the continent would circulate in the Missionary Herald and other publications and help persuade other women to follow.

After a few well-fed days at Fort Walla Walla, the five missionaries were ushered into one of the company’s large, thirty-foot-long, flat-bottomed boats, called bateaux, for the last segment of their trip, down the Columbia River to Fort Vancouver. The boats, specially designed for the wild rivers of the Northwest, were equipped with square sails but were powered largely by the muscles of their French Canadian voyageurs, usually eight to a boat. Pambrun accompanied them. The two Nez Perce boys stayed behind to tend to the livestock. Whitman noted later, in a report to the American Board, that the boys had been “very usefull [sic] to us in driving our cattle” all the way from Missouri to Oregon Country, although the relationship would soon sour.49

The missionaries landed at Fort Vancouver on September 12, after a six-day excursion that introduced them to the beauty and terrors of an undammed Columbia. The river, initially “clear as crystal & smooth as a sea of glass,” morphed abruptly into a series of wildly frothing rapids, as if it had been “cut up and destroyed by these huge masses of rocks,” Narcissa wrote.50 The boat was carried around the most dangerous portions of the river but sometimes only the passengers were unloaded, while the oarsmen stayed aboard to battle through the rapids. Townsend, who made the same trip a few days earlier, was awed by the skill of the voyageurs: “The middle-men ply their oars; the guides brace themselves against the gunwale of the boat, placing their paddles edgewise down her sides, and away she goes over the curling, foaming, and hissing waters, like a race horse.”51 Narcissa learned later that “many boats have been dashed to pieces at these places, and more than a hundred lives lost.”52

Fort Vancouver was the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast Columbia District. Under the management of Dr. John McLoughlin, the chief factor, it had become a bustling commercial center and supply depot. (In company parlance, business agents and managers were called “factors,” a mathematical term reflecting their role in keeping track of money and merchandise.) Fort Vancouver’s orchards, fields, and pastures stretched for fifteen miles along the Columbia and five miles inland. Inside the central stockade were some forty buildings, including warehouses, a school, a library, a chapel, a rudimentary hospital, and housing for British officers and company officials. Outside was a multicultural village with inhabitants from more than thirty-five different ethnic and tribal groups, including a large number of Hawaiians who worked for the company. About a thousand head of cattle grazed on nearby pastures, along with sheep, goats, and other livestock. There was a shipyard, a sawmill, a tannery, a dairy, and (to the disapproval of the missionaries) a distillery. All together, up to seven hundred people lived in and around Fort Vancouver in the mid-1830s. Narcissa called it “the New York of the Pacific Ocean.”53 Never having seen New York City, which had a population of three hundred thousand at the time, her enthusiasm can be excused.

It was the custom for traders going down the Columbia by bateaux to stop at the sawmill, a few miles upstream from the fort, to give the men time to shave and dress in cleaner clothes, while a messenger was sent ahead with news that they were on their way. When McLoughlin heard that two American women were in the approaching party, he ordered that they be given a suitable welcome. There were two tall ships at anchor in front of the fort; he asked that the ships be dressed out in all their flags. He himself came out to meet the missionaries at the fort’s main gate and usher them into his large white house. The women luxuriated in the experience of sitting on a sofa for the first time in seven months. McLoughlin then took the visitors on a tour of the gardens and other facilities. “What a delightful place this is,” Narcissa gushed.54 Eliza too was impressed, to “find ourselves in the midst of civilization, where the luxuries of life seem to abound.”55

The American women were surprised to find two English women at the fort. One, the wife of William Capendale—an expert farmer who had been sent from London to take charge of the fort’s farm and dairy—had arrived with her husband on the company’s ship Columbia in May. The other was Jane Beaver, wife of Rev. Herbert Beaver, an Anglican minister who had been hired as a chaplain and schoolteacher. The Beavers had arrived on another of the company’s ships, the Nereide, just one week before the Whitmans and Spaldings. “This is more than we expected when we left home,” Narcissa wrote, “that we should be privileged with the acquaintance and society of two English ladies.”56 The “ladies” were less impressed, both with Fort Vancouver and with the company of the rustic newcomers. The Capendales sailed back to London as soon as they could, departing on the Columbia in November. The Beavers remained for another two years, but Jane regarded the missionary women as beneath her and had little to do with them.

The American Board expected Whitman and Spalding to establish one joint mission, with Gray as their assistant. But personality differences helped derail that plan. Whitman was demanding and inflexible; Spalding, self-righteous and quick-tempered; and Gray, universally disliked. In fact, relations among all the members of the board’s Oregon Mission—including four couples who arrived as reinforcements in 1838—were contentious. None of them got along. They quarreled about everything from how to load a wagon to how to pray. As writer William Dietrich has pointed out, “the same strong-minded idealism that fired people with Christian zeal made it difficult for them to cooperate.”57 The six couples ended up establishing four missions, hundreds of miles apart.

By the time they reached Fort Vancouver, Whitman and Spalding had made up their minds to establish separate missions. On September 21 the two men and Gray left to survey potential sites. Two Hawaiian laborers and Hinds (the “colored man” who had joined the missionaries at the Green River rendezvous) went with them. Narcissa and Eliza stayed behind. The women spent almost eight weeks at Fort Vancouver while their husbands were gone. They helped out in the school, which had about fifty students, most of them the children of French Canadian fathers and Indian mothers. Narcissa taught singing. Eliza’s health improved. Both women shopped in the fort’s warehouses, selecting linen, china, blankets, cookware, furniture, and other goods, sending the bills back to the board in Boston. They feasted on the food served at McLoughlin’s table, which Narcissa described in lingering detail: coffee or cocoa, salmon and roasted ducks with potatoes for breakfast; soup as a first course at dinner, followed by a succession of entrees; then by pudding or pie; then a melon course; and finally cheese with bread or biscuits and butter—each course served on a clean plate, and all the cooking, serving, and cleaning up done by servants (mostly Hawaiian, Indian, or métis women). The missionary women abstained only from the wine and tried without success to elicit pledges of temperance from “the gentlemen” at the fort.

McLoughlin’s wife, Marguerite (a woman of mixed Indian and European heritage), took Narcissa and Eliza horseback riding one day and tried to convince them that they would be safer and more comfortable riding astride, on Indian-style saddles with high backs and fronts, instead of on sidesaddles. The white women demurred. “We have been recommended to use these saddles, as a more easy way of riding,” Narcissa wrote, “but we have never seen the necessity of changing our fashion.”58

As the head of the company’s Columbia District from 1824 until 1846, McLoughlin was the most powerful man in the Pacific Northwest. He managed an international trading network; maintained peace among dozens of Indian tribes; and served as de facto governor of a region that stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, as far north as Alaska and south into California. He was a physically imposing figure: six feet four, with broad, muscular shoulders, blue eyes that many described as “steely,” and a thick mane of hair that had turned completely white by the time he settled into life at Fort Vancouver, at age forty. Coastal Indians called him Chakchak, meaning White Headed Eagle.

Like many white men in the fur trade, McLoughlin had entered into “country marriages”—first with an Ojibwe woman, who died shortly after giving birth to their fourth child and first son, Joseph; and then, around 1810, to Marguerite, the daughter of a Swiss merchant and a Cree woman. Marguerite had also entered into a “country marriage” with Alexander McKay, a New York–born trader with the North West Company. (Thomas McKay, who helped guide the missionary party from the rendezvous, was their son.) Such marriages—à la façon du pays, or “in the manner of the country”—were accepted and even encouraged by both fur companies. The unions could be informal and easily dissolved, as apparently was the case with Marguerite’s marriage to Alexander McKay; or enduring, like her second marriage, to McLoughlin, which lasted from around 1810 until his death in 1857.

After McLoughlin became chief factor and the couple moved to Fort Vancouver, in 1824, Marguerite began dressing in the style of a cultured white woman. She had no formal education and could neither read nor write but she spoke three languages: French, English, and her native Cree. She spent her days managing servants, looking after children (she and McLoughlin had four together), and doing needlework, including intricate beading. She was known for her calm and gentle manner. However, her dress and demeanor did not protect her from epithets based on her Indian heritage. When Herbert Beaver disembarked from the Nereide, he demanded that the “half-breed women” greeting the ship be moved out of the way so that he and his wife, Jane, could pass safely. Marguerite was one of those women. The other was Amelia Connolly Douglas, the métis wife of James Douglas, second in command at Fort Vancouver. Narcissa was less imperious but still described “Mrs. McLoughlin and Mrs. Douglas” as “natives of the country—half breeds.”59 She spent eleven years in Oregon and never stopped thinking of nonwhite women as her inferiors.

Narcissa took time during her stay at Fort Vancouver to bring her journal up to date. She had entrusted the first part of it to Nathaniel Wyeth. The rigors of traveling over the Rockies did not allow her to make detailed daily entries after that, but she kept field notes and used them as the basis for the second half of her travel diary, covering July 18 through November 1, 1836. At Marcus’s suggestion, Narcissa made a copy of the diary for his mother. She left both the original and the copy at the fort, in the care of the captain of the Columbia, to be delivered to the American Board’s mission in Hawaii and forwarded from there to the United States. In the coming years, the missionaries would send mail mostly by the Hudson’s Bay “express”—a convoy of fur traders who traveled from Fort Vancouver overland to Montreal twice a year. From there letters could be sent on to the United States. The total delivery time was about six months, compared to at least eighteen months for mail going by ship from Vancouver to Hawaii, around Cape Horn at the tip of South America to London, and across the Atlantic to New York.

Henry Spalding returned to Fort Vancouver in late October with the news that he had chosen a mission site at Lapwai (“Place of Butterflies”) in Nez Perce territory on the Clearwater River in Idaho. Whitman had settled on a place about 120 miles southwest of Lapwai, near a Cayuse village at Weyiilet, meaning “Place of Waving Grass” (the suffix “pu,” as in “Waiilatpu,” meant “people of” that place).60 It was a pleasant site, next to a branch of the Walla Walla River, but it was miles from good timber. McLoughlin warned Whitman that the Cayuse were less tractable than the Nez Perce. A Nez Perce headman agreed, telling Whitman “the Nez Perces do not have difficulties with the white man as Cayous do” and predicting the missionaries “will see the difference.”61 Whitman ignored the warnings. He, William Henry Gray, the Hawaiians, and Hinds began building an adobe house with an attached lean-to at what they called Waiilatpu, while Spalding went to the fort to retrieve the women. The Cayuse were puzzled to see men putting up a shelter. In Cayuse culture, that was women’s work. It was the first of many cultural misunderstandings between the Whitmans and their hosts.

On November 3, 1836, Spalding and the women left Fort Vancouver for lives that would never again have the same degree of comfort and ease they had enjoyed as guests of Chief Factor McLoughlin.