CHAPTER FIVE:
EARLY YEARS AT WAIILATPU
At first view the country does not seem adapted for settlement but I am satisfied it will support a great population.
—Marcus Whitman, March 24, 1838
Narcissa Whitman and the Spaldings left Fort Vancouver at noon on Thursday, November 3, 1836, traveling upriver in two of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s bateaux with trader John McLeod and sixteen voyageurs. Narcissa and McLeod sat in one boat, the Spaldings in the other. Packed around them were five tons of supplies and equipment, from china to farm implements to building materials, all bought on credit at Fort Vancouver. The missionaries were almost willfully ignorant of the values, traditions, and expectations of the people they were going to be living with. For example, after Henry Spalding and Marcus Whitman met with a group of Cayuse and Walla Walla headmen while scouting locations for their separate missions, Spalding advised friends in Prattsburg: “Natives very friendly, formerly very dangerous cannibals.”1 The missionaries also underestimated the hardships they would face in simply housing and feeding themselves. But the mood, as they set out, was optimistic. They were confident that they were following God’s plan and relieved to be, in Narcissa’s words, “so near a fixed location after journeying so long.”2
It took ten mostly miserable days to get to Fort Walla Walla. It rained almost constantly. The boats had to be rowed ashore, unloaded, and carried around the most impassable parts of the Columbia Gorge, the ninety-mile-long passageway cut through the Cascade Mountains by an untamed river. At calmer stretches the passengers and cargo remained on board with a skeleton crew while some of the voyageurs climbed on shore and used tow ropes to haul the boats upriver. “It is a terrific sight, & a frightful place to be in, to be drawn along in such a narrow channel between such high, craggy, perpendicular bluffs, the men with the rope clambering sometimes upon their hands & knees upon the very edge, so high above us as to appear small, like boys,” Narcissa wrote in a letter to her mother.3 Local Indians were hired to help with both the portages and the ropes. Despite the missionaries’ personal objections to use of “the Devil’s Weed,” they paid the Indians with twists of tobacco, purchased at the fort on Chief Factor McLoughlin’s advice. Northwest Indians had come to value Virginia-grown tobacco above almost any other item for trade or gift exchange.
The travelers reached the eastern end of the gorge a week after leaving Fort Vancouver. Behind them lay mossy forests and thick woodlands; ahead, treeless grasslands. The rain continued. Spalding, in a report to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, noted the scarcity of firewood. “In this country of no wood, we were of course in danger of being without fire for the night,” he wrote. “We were supplied, however, every night, usually from graves or miserable huts of poor natives, for a small piece of tobacco.”4 With his casual remark about the desecration of Indian graves, Spalding underscored a key assumption—widely shared by his fellow missionaries—that native spiritual practices were not worthy of respect or even acknowledgment.
The party arrived at Fort Walla Walla on November 13. Marcus Whitman and William Henry Gray joined them five days later. Marcus told Narcissa the house that he and Gray had been building at Waiilatpu was not yet “a comfortable place” for her. She readily accepted an invitation from Pierre Pambrun, the chief trader, to stay at the fort with him and his family. Marcus returned to Waiilatpu alone. Gray and the Spaldings left for Lapwai with a Nez Perce escort shortly after that.5 “This dear Sister goes very cheerfully to her location to live in a skin lodge untill [sic] her house is built & this too in the dead of winter,” wrote Narcissa, referring to Eliza Spalding, “but she prefers it to remaining here & so should I.”6 In fact, as historian Julie Roy Jeffrey has observed, Narcissa was in no hurry to set up housekeeping “in inconvenient and uncomfortable circumstances.”7 She remained at the fort for another three weeks.
Fort Walla Walla was crude by the standards of Fort Vancouver, but Narcissa enjoyed her time there. She was flattered by the attention that Pambrun and his métis wife, Catherine, gave her. Like Marguerite McLoughlin, Catherine was descended from white men who had married Indian women. Her grandfather was British; her father was of mixed European and Indian heritage; and her mother was Cree and Ojibwe. She and Pambrun had six children at the time of Narcissa’s visit (two more would be born later). Both Catherine and her oldest daughter, ten-year-old Maria, spoke some English. Narcissa said it was “a very kind Providence to be situated near one family so interesting & a native female that promises to be so much society for me.”8 Although Narcissa would develop a closer relationship with Catherine than with any other nonwhite women in Oregon, she never accepted the fact that a “native female” could be her equal, or have anything of value to teach her.
Marcus returned to Walla Walla on December 10 and escorted a heavily pregnant Narcissa to Waiilatpu and the threshold of a half-finished house on the north bank of a bend in a Walla Walla River channel. Aside from a fringe of cottonwoods and willows along the riverbank, the area was treeless. Compared with the rounded hills and dense woodlands of upstate New York, Waiilatpu was an ambush of expanse, filling and intimidating the senses. Wind-whipped grasslands stretched “as far as the eye can reach,” Narcissa wrote.9 The Blue Mountains rose in the southeast, gauzy with distance. The house was an adobe structure, one and a half stories tall, thirty feet wide, and thirty-six feet long. A twelve-foot-wide lean-to, made of split logs fitted into grooved posts and caulked with mud, was attached to one wall. Only the lean-to had been completed by the time Narcissa arrived. There was a chimney and fireplace and a wooden floor, but no windows and only a blanket to cover the door.10 The couple stayed in the lean-to for several weeks while work continued on the main house.
By early January 1837, doors and windows had been installed and the house partitioned into three rooms: a bedroom for the Whitmans at one end, a kitchen and dining room in the middle, and a small bedroom and pantry at the other end. Like all the buildings that would be constructed at the Whitman Mission, the roof consisted of poles covered with straw topped with six inches of dirt. Narcissa fought a continuing and futile battle against those roofs. They leaked mud during heavy rains and dusted the rooms with silt in drier weather. The family moved into a larger, more elegant house in 1840, but that structure also had a sod roof. Marcus promised to replace it with a board roof, using lumber from a sawmill he planned to construct in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Seven years passed before the sawmill became a reality. On the eve of the attack in 1847, he had a stockpile of thirteen thousand board feet at the mission and another forty thousand board feet at the mill, awaiting delivery for, among other things, construction of new roofs.11
Pierre Pambrun lent the Whitmans a small stove to heat their bedroom and a table for the kitchen. The only other furniture was a rough bedstead and three chairs (two of them made by Marcus, with cottonwood frames and deerskin seats). Narcissa was obviously ambivalent about her situation. In a letter to her parents dated January 2, 1837, she wrote about being “alone, in the thick darkness of heathenism,” yet she insisted “I am spending my winter as comfortably as heart could wish.”12 She gave birth in that house to her only child, a daughter, on the evening of March 14, 1837—the day of her own twenty-ninth birthday. Named Alice Clarissa after her two grandmothers, the child was the first born of American parents in what is now Washington State.
It was apparently an easy delivery. Narcissa wrote that she was “sick” (i.e., in labor) for only about two hours. Catherine Pambrun and her daughter Maria came to help. It must have been strange for Catherine to see a man—Marcus Whitman—attending the birth. In her culture only women assisted with a delivery. After the birth the baby would have been dried off, wrapped in rabbit fur, nursed, and placed in a cradleboard lined with moss.13 Narcissa was amused to see Catherine and Marcus fumbling with Euro-American-style clothing for her newborn. “It would have made you smile to see them work over the little creature,” she wrote to her mother. “Mrs P never saw one dressed before as we dress them having been accostomed [sic] to dress her own in the native stile [sic].”14
The Mission House was located about a mile west of a small Cayuse winter village. Most of the fifty or so occupants had been away on the annual fall hunt when the Whitmans moved in, but they had returned in time to greet the arrival of Alice Clarissa. “The Little Stranger is visited daily by the Chiefs & principal men in camp & the women throng the house continually waiting an opportunity to see her,” Narcissa reported to her parents. The Indians seemed intrigued by the baby’s fair skin and light brown hair; apparently none of them had ever seen a Caucasian infant before. “Her whole appearance is so new to them. Her complexion her size & dress & all excite a deal of wonder,” Narcissa wrote.15 One curiosity, she added, was the fact that her child was not confined to a cradleboard. The Indians “think it very strange that she should sleep with me without being tied up, so that I should not kill her.”16
Among the visitors who came to see the baby was Tiloukaikt, a leader of the Walla Walla band of Cayuse, one of three major bands during the 1830s. The other two bands were centered on the Umatilla River—one on the headwaters in the Blue Mountains, the other downstream, near present-day Pendleton, Oregon. In her first mention of this headman, Narcissa called him “Tee-low-kike, a kind, friendly Indian.” He told her Alice Clarissa was a “Cayuse te-mi” (girl), because she had been born on Cayuse land. Narcissa had the impression that “the whole tribe are highly pleased because we allow her to be called a Cayuse Girl.”17
Tiloukaikt showed an early interest in adopting what Narcissa called “the manners and customs of civilized life.”18 He began cultivating a plot of land under Marcus Whitman’s direction, regularly participated in religious services led by the missionaries, and sent three of his children to school at the mission. Narcissa gave them all Christian names. She named the oldest “David,” after one of her childhood friends, and the other two “Edward” and “Jane,” after two of her siblings. But this was during a honeymoon period. Tiloukaikt later became one of the Whitmans’ primary critics and eventual foes.
Arriving at a time when fresh food was scarce, the Whitmans supplemented their diet that first winter by killing and eating nine horses, bought from the Indians at a cost of $6 total, paid mostly in tobacco. They didn’t butcher any of the cattle they had driven west from Missouri until 1841, after the small herd had increased to a sustainable level. Whitman tried to buy more cattle from John McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver, saying it was cheaper to raise them for free on the open grasslands than buy horsemeat from the Indians, but McLoughlin refused to sell. More than thirty Indian horses were slaughtered to feed the mission’s residents and visitors during the first four years.
Whitman began preparing fields for planting as soon as the snow melted, in late February. It was grueling, bone-cracking work to cut through the thick mantle of sod and the stirrup-high grass that gave Waiilatpu its name. He had one plow for his own use but only fifteen rudimentary hoes to offer would-be farmers among the Cayuse. Still, Whitman was encouraged by the fact that Tiloukaikt, his sons, and several other families were willing to experiment with American-style agriculture. “I think there can be no doubt of their rediness [sic] to adopt cultivation,” he exulted (prematurely, it would turn out), “and when they have plenty of food they will be little disposed to wander.”19 He begged the American Board to send him at least fifty more plows and three hundred hoes. “If we had them,” he explained, “it would not be long before we should see [Indians] located arround [sic] us, with houses, fields, gardens, hogs, and cows.”20
Convincing Indians to adopt a settled, agrarian lifestyle was a key agenda item for all Protestant missionaries in Oregon Country. People who moved from place to place as the seasons and food sources changed could not be exposed to “the benefit of constant instruction” in missionary schools and churches. “This field is emphatically white for the harvest,” Whitman said, referring to the harvesting of souls, but first the Indians would have to be “attracted and retained by the plough and hoe.”21 Spalding put it more bluntly: “No savage has ever become christianized upon the wing.”22
Whitman selected Waiilatpu as a location partly because of its potential for agriculture. “We have far more good land for cultivation here,” he told the American Board, “than at any other place on the uper [sic] Columbia.”23 The site included good soil, lots of sunshine, and a long growing season. What it lacked was abundant rainfall. The Walla Walla Valley averages only about eighteen inches of rain a year. There was plenty of water, though, flowing out of the snowfields in the Blue Mountains and into the tributaries of the Walla Walla River. Whitman dug irrigation ditches to move water from the channel behind his house to his ever-expanding fields. However, easy access to the water proved to be a mixed blessing. The stream regularly rose high enough with spring snowmelt to overflow its banks and flood the cellar in the house. The cellar was lined with adobe bricks, made of mud and straw. The bricks absorbed so much water that at one point Whitman feared they would collapse and the house “would fall upon us.”24 He stubbornly repaired the damage, year after year, until finally giving up and building a new, larger house on higher ground in 1840.
All timber for the mission had to be hauled on horse-drawn sleds from the Blue Mountains, fifteen miles away. It would have been easier to build in the Cayuse style, making use of materials close at hand. John Townsend, the Philadelphia-born naturalist who came to Oregon Country with Nathaniel Wyeth in the early 1830s, remarked on the snug construction of the tule lodges in a Cayuse village on the Umatilla River that he visited in July 1836. Townsend had stayed in the headman’s lodge. “The house is really a very comfortable one,” he wrote. It was about sixty feet long, fifteen feet wide, well ventilated in summer, weather-tight in winter.25 But the Whitmans would have been horrified at the idea of living in such a “heathen” dwelling. Instead, they sought to re-create the familiar. Their house looked like one that could have been built anywhere in western New York during frontier times.
The Whitmans worked tirelessly to create the scaffolding for the life they wanted: to build and maintain what they considered suitable shelter; to grow, harvest, and preserve the kind of food they wanted to eat; and to provide the amenities they valued, from woven cloth for their garments to venetian blinds for their windows. They had little help. Three of the four hired hands who had been with them on the Great Plains left before they reached Oregon. The fourth, his name recorded only as “Hinds, a colored man,” died of what Whitman called “dropsy” (meaning edema, or swelling of the soft tissues, possibly due to congestive heart failure) while working on the lean-to at Waiilatpu. Hinds was the first person to be buried in the mission cemetery.26 The Whitmans tried to hire Indians as laborers, but none of the Cayuse and only a few of the neighboring Walla Wallas were willing; only slaves did the kind of work the missionaries wanted done. Their most dependable laborers were Hawaiians recruited from the multicultural workforce at Fort Vancouver, but none of them stayed very long. Narcissa usually had one or two young métis girls to help with household chores, but she complained that they needed constant supervision. She found it frustrating that so few of the native and mixed-race people who would work for them spoke English. “You have no idea how difficult it is to realize any benefit from those who do not understand you,” she wrote.27
The language barrier was a constant challenge. Whitman confessed he had only a limited command of Nez Perce, the primary language spoken by the Cayuse, after four years in Oregon. Narcissa, by her own account, was never able to “do much more than stammer” in it.28 Whitman had hoped that the two Nez Perce boys that he had taken east with him would learn enough English to serve as interpreters, but one of the boys, “John,” returned to his Nez Perce homeland in November 1836, and the other, “Richard,” quarreled with Whitman and left Waiilatpu six months later. Whitman said he was “expeled”; Spalding said he had run away.29 For the most part, the Whitmans relied on Chinook Jargon to communicate with Indians. They learned the words and phrases that an employer would use in directing the labor of a simple-minded servant: make a fire; chop this wood; cook this food; plow this field, dig this ditch.30 To explain basic concepts of Christianity, they used language like this, from a lesson created by a Methodist missionary in the Willamette Valley in 1838:
Your heart good? (Mican tum-tum cloosh?) Your heart no good (Mican tum-tum wake cloosh). By-and-by you die (Alaka mican ma-ma lose). Your heart good you go to God (Mican tum-tum cloosh mican clatamay Sakalatie). God make very good your heart (Sakalatie mamoke hiyas cloosh mican tum-tum).31
After two years in Oregon, Whitman proudly reported to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that “the heaviest part of our establishment is made.” He had forty acres under cultivation and was producing enough corn, wheat, and potatoes to send Spalding some of the surplus. Whitman’s cattle and horses had wintered as well on grassland as if they had been stabled and fed corn and oats in the East. He and Narcissa were raising chickens, turkeys, and hogs and were expecting to have a few sheep soon, imported from Hawaii. “We have no want of Provisions for ourselves and Seed for the Indians,” he wrote.32
However, there was less evidence of progress with Indians. Whitman couched that part of his report in vague terms. “Several” families were cultivating small plots of land. From fifteen to twenty children were coming to the mission to attend school, at least during the winter. “Many” had acquired “good proficiency” in reading, writing, and speaking English, in classes Narcissa taught in her kitchen. “Some” parents had expressed an interest in having their children go to school year-round. The Indians were apparently “much pleased” with the hymns the missionaries taught them to sing, in Sunday services held in a chief’s lodge in the nearby village because the Whitmans’ house was too small to accommodate everyone who wanted to come.33
The Cayuse had already adopted some elements of Euro-American culture by the time the Whitmans arrived. A few wore articles of European clothing and raised cattle as well as horses. Many prayed twice a day—a practice introduced by French Canadian fur traders working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. But their cultural borrowing was limited, and they showed no interest in jettisoning their entire way of life. They planted only those crops—such as potatoes, corn, beans, and melons—that required relatively little tending and did not interfere with hunting, fishing, or root- and berry-gathering cycles. They continued to spend months away from the mission. They were also selective in responding to the Whitmans’ brand of Christianity. They enjoyed chanting along with hymns and prayers (sacred chants had long been part of Cayuse spiritual practice). But to the degree that they understood what the Whitmans had to say about damnation and the evils of idolatry, polygamy, original sin, and other aspects of Calvinistic doctrine, they rejected it. “Some feel almost to blame us for telling them about eternal realities,” Narcissa wrote. “One said it was good when they knew nothing but to hunt, eat, drink and sleep; now it was bad.”34
In a letter to the American Board in March 1838, Whitman acknowledged that he and Narcissa were spending more time on “secular affairs” than desirable for missionaries whose professed purpose was to “be the humble instruments of good to the bodies and souls of the benighted Indians.” He blamed the lack of help. If they had more “associates and labourers,” he explained, they could spend more time learning the language; if they had better command of the language, they could be more effective in transforming the spiritual and physical lives of Indians.35 Two months later, he sent a more urgent plea to the board. “We are now at an important crisis, and need men and means to carry out what has been so auspiciously begun,” he wrote. The “crisis” came into focus with the appearance of Jason Lee, head of the Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley, who stopped by Waiilatpu and then Lapwai while traveling east with plans to convey a shipload of Methodists to Oregon. The Methodist Mission Board had already sent two small groups of missionaries and laypeople, about twenty in all, to reinforce the Willamette mission and establish a satellite station at The Dalles. Lee hoped to add maybe two hundred more. He had been promised at least $40,000 (nearly $1 million today) to finance it. Whitman and Spalding were stunned by the breadth of Lee’s ambitions. Deeply envious and more than a little wistful, they hurriedly composed an appeal to their board, asking that they “not be left unsupported while our Methodist Brethren devise so liberal things.”36
Nearly every letter that Whitman and Spalding had sent to the American Board in the previous two years had included a generic request for more help. Now they went into detail, at length. They asked that thirty ordained ministers, thirty farmers, thirty schoolteachers, ten physicians, and ten mechanics (including blacksmiths), with their wives—a total of two hundred twenty men and women—be sent out “with the least possible delay.” The Oregon Mission needed “several tons of iron and steel, a sufficient quantity of balls, 2,000 gun flints, 50 gross Indian awls, 100 dozen knives, blankets, crockery, tinware, two cook stoves, six box stoves….” The list went on and on: four pit saws, two crosscuts with handles, augers, axes, adzes. They wanted “five hundred yards of striped or checked cotton for shirts to be made by native girls.” Also, “books, slates, pencils, ink-powder, ink stands, & paper suitable and sufficient for two English schools of 50 scholars each.” And brass kettles, glass tumblers, teacups and saucers, eight two-quart pitchers, four washbowls. Not to be omitted: one dozen chamber pots with covers, because it could get cold at Waiilatpu and Lapwai in the winter; and “12 palm leaf hats,” because summers were hot; six pairs of men’s shoes, an equal number of women’s shoes, and how about six large cowbells as well as “maps & charts, etc.” It seemed as if the two men were adding to the list as soon as things came to mind, expecting the people in Boston to sort it out. They were in a rush to finish their letter to the board, because Lee had agreed to deliver their message and was ready to depart. Spalding wrote the cover letter, but they both signed it. It included this warning: “You can no longer suffer this great harvest field to remain unoccupied by laborers without inflicting an incalculable injury upon these immortal souls & inciting the fearful displeasure of Heaven.”37
David Greene, secretary of the board, must have been incredulous and possibly apoplectic when he received this letter and the multipage list accompanying it. The board was overextended, with 360 missionaries and laypeople at 69 locations around the world, and underfinanced, consistently spending more than it was taking in through donations. It had been accumulating ever-larger annual deficits even before a banking crisis in 1837 triggered a major depression in the United States and left the board “much embarrassed for want of funds.”38 Greene had not been pleased by the latest bill he had received from the Hudson’s Bay Company for purchases made by the Oregon missionaries. He received that bill, for more than $2,000, on July 5, 1837. The very next day, he fired off a letter to Whitman and Spalding, ordering them to slash their spending to $1,000 a year, total, for both stations. “Your mission must be sustained hereafter at a less comparative expense than it has been hitherto, or the Committee will feel obliged to discontinue it,” he warned.39 The two messages—the grandiose hopes for expansion from the West and the warning to cut back from Boston—crossed each other in transit. When Whitman and Spalding sat down with their pens to scratch out their wish list, Lee’s voice ringing in their ears, the American Board had already dispatched the only additional group of missionaries that it would ever send to Oregon.
William Henry Gray had returned east on his own in the fall of 1837. After spending time in Ithaca with the Rev. Samuel Parker and briefly attending medical school, Gray convinced the board to send him back to Oregon with reinforcements. Three newly married couples who were already in the pipeline for assignment to overseas missions agreed to go with him. The party traveled overland with the American Fur Company’s caravan and arrived in Waiilatpu at the end of August 1838. Greene received the appeal from Oregon for 220 missionaries and laypeople and boatloads of supplies a month later. His wry response was measured: “I would say that your expectations are too high for the means of the Board or for the spirit of a Christian community.”40
The new arrivals had little in common besides evangelistic zeal. Three of the men were Congregational ministers. Elkanah Walker, named after a figure in the Old Testament, was a tall, awkward, thirty-three-year-old former farmer from Maine. His wife, Mary Richardson, twenty-seven, was an acerbic, strong-minded woman who had applied on her own to become a missionary before she met Elkanah. Like Narcissa Prentiss, she had been rejected because she was single. Cushing Eells, twenty-eight, born and raised in western Massachusetts, had paid his way through college and seminary by working as a schoolteacher. He was married to Myra Fairbanks Eells, five years his senior, the daughter of a church deacon in Holden, Massachusetts. Twenty-nine-year-old Asa B. Smith of Vermont, a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School, was a man of firm convictions and little patience for divergent opinions. His wife, Sarah, twenty-five, traced her ancestors back to the Mayflower. Cornelius Rogers, an unmarried twenty-two-year-old, was an acolyte of Rev. Lyman Beecher, the prominent abolitionist minister in Cincinnati. Inspired by the reception the three couples had received when they visited Beecher’s church, en route to Oregon, Rogers signed on too.
Gray had impulsively joined the Whitman/Spalding expedition as a carpenter and mechanic in 1836, and just as impulsively returned to his hometown in Fairfield, New York, a year later. He wanted to find a wife, promote the Oregon Mission, and become a full-fledged missionary with a station of his own. He enrolled in medical school (the same one Whitman had attended) but dropped out after three months. To Whitman’s extreme annoyance, Gray appropriated the title of “Doctor” anyway. He met his future wife, Mary Augusta Dix, at a church social in Ithaca. He courted her by promising that “thousands will immediately feel your influence and tens of thousands must in time, and unnumbered souls may bless the house in which you did decide to devote your life to the Salvation of 6,277,000 natives on our own continent.”41 They were married on February 25, 1838, eleven days after being introduced, and left for Oregon the next day, joining the three other couples and Cornelius Rogers in Saint Louis in mid-March.
By the time the “reinforcements” reached Waiilatpu, almost six months later, they were all thoroughly sick of each other. “We have a strange company of Missionaries,” Mary Walker confided in her diary. “Scarcely one who is not intolerable on some account.”42 The same sense of moral certainty that had drawn them to missionary work seemed to apply to their personal relationships as well, making it hard for them to tolerate what they viewed as shortcomings in others. None of them showed much Christian forbearance for one another.
The seven male members of the American Board’s newly expanded Oregon Mission conducted their first business meeting on September 1, 1838. The women were not allowed to participate. The main issue was who was to go where. The men decided that Walker and Eells would establish a new station near Spokane Falls, where the Spokane Indians had given Spalding and Gray what seemed a cordial reception a year earlier. Smith would stay with Whitman. Rogers was to help Spalding at Lapwai. Nobody wanted Gray. Finally, Spalding agreed to take him.
Two days later, the six wives crowded into a room by themselves and organized the Columbia Maternal Association, the first American women’s club in the Northwest. Only Narcissa and Eliza were mothers at the time, but two of the other women were pregnant, and they all expected that motherhood would be their primary role in life. Isolated in what they considered a “heathen land,” far from family and friends, the women turned to each other for help in “the right performance of our Maternal duties.”43 Such groups, sponsored by evangelical Protestant churches, were common in western New York and New England. By creating an association of their own, the women hoped to connect not only with each other but with the worlds they had left behind. The charter members were never able to meet as a group, in person, again, but they held the equivalent of virtual meetings twice a month, sometimes in the company of one or two other women but often on their own. They set aside an hour on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month when they would think of each other, read selected texts, and pray for the strength to be mothers in the wilderness.
The Spaldings soon returned to Lapwai, accompanied by Rogers and the Grays. The remaining four couples bickered their way through a long winter in very close quarters at the Whitman Mission. The only housing consisted of the original Mission House, a total of fifteen hundred square feet, partitioned into five small rooms. Twelve people had been sharing this space before the newcomers arrived: the Whitmans and their toddler daughter; Charles Compo (the French Canadian trapper who had served as an interpreter for Samuel Parker), his Nez Perce wife, and their eighteen-month-old son; four Hawaiian servants; a teenage métis girl; and a young half-Hawaiian, half-Indian boy. The addition of six other adults, one of whom—Mary Walker—was nearly full-term pregnant, seemed to bring out the worst in everyone. Petty grievances flared into major ones under the stress of overcrowding and incompatible personalities. Elkanah Walker chewed tobacco, much to Narcissa’s disgust. Myra Eells resented the time Narcissa spent writing. The Walkers used wine for medicinal purposes, and all the newcomers drank wine with communion, offending the teetotaling Whitmans. Asa Smith was “a hog at table.”44 The Smiths were shocked that Mary Walker gave birth to a son exactly nine months and two days after her marriage—a demonstration, they thought, of unseemly carnality.
Myra Eells’s use of snuff drove Mary Walker to distraction. Cushing Eells objected to Mary Walker’s habit of staying up late. She, in turn, thought he was “very uninteresting and unsocial.”45 Narcissa was alternately peremptory and withdrawn. None of the women felt that the others were doing their share of the household chores. Marcus groused that the board had sent three clergymen as reinforcements when what he needed were people who could work with their hands. Before the winter was over, Smith declared that he would rather leave the Oregon Mission than have any further association with Marcus Whitman. Sarah Smith irritated nearly everyone by weeping almost constantly. “How do you think I have lived with such folks right in my kitchen for the whole winter?” Narcissa asked, in a letter to her sister Jane.46
The Smiths moved into a separate structure, hurriedly built of adobe, in early December 1838, just days before Mary Walker’s son, Cyrus, was born. Mary was unable to nurse successfully; her attempts brought her such pain that she felt as if she had “two broken breasts.”47 Narcissa, who was still nursing her own child, two-year-old Alice Clarissa, nursed Mary’s son for a few weeks but then weaned Alice and stopped feeding Cyrus. She told Mary that if Cyrus got hungry enough, he would somehow get milk from his mother’s breasts. A hungry, wailing infant could only have added to the tensions in that household. Mary tried a rudimentary breast pump; she tried artificial nipples. She finally gave up altogether and, over Narcissa’s objections, fed Cyrus cow’s milk from a bottle. The conflict permanently soured the relationship between the two women.
In early March 1839 the Walkers and the Eells left to establish a new mission at Tshimakain (“Place of Springs”), near present-day Spokane, about 160 miles north of Waiilatpu. The Smiths left at the end of April for a station of their own, at Kamiah, about 60 miles southeast of Lapwai. Members of American Board’s Oregon Mission thus ended up on four widely separated stations. One of the consequences was that Whitman had even less time to devote to missionary work at Waiilatpu. He was often called away to the other stations, on business or medical matters (including the delivery of some two dozen American missionary babies over a period of eight years), leaving Narcissa alone and overwhelmed at home.
Neither of the Whitmans ever mastered the language of the people they were trying to convert, but their young daughter seemed to pick it up easily. Alice Clarissa was babbling in both English and Nez Perce when she was just eighteen months old. The Indians were “very much pleased to think she is going to speak their language so readily,” Narcissa told her family. “They appear to love her much.”48 By age two the child was speaking both languages “quite fluently,” Narcissa bragged.49 The little girl loved to sing and seemed as interested in the Indians as they were in her. She might have served as a conduit, to help her parents and their hosts recognize the humanity in each other. But around 2:30 p.m. on June 23, 1839, a Sunday, while Marcus and Narcissa were reading and a teenage métis servant was preparing supper, Alice Clarissa took two cups down to the river behind the Mission House to get some water, tumbled in, and drowned. An Indian found her body, lodged against some brush. She was two years, three months, and nine days old.
The Walkers had been visiting the Spaldings at Lapwai and were on their way back to Tshimakain when a messenger reached them with news of the death. If Mary Walker felt much sympathy, she didn’t share it with her diary. “We had travelled about 40 miles in an opposite direction & did not deem it expedient to return” for the funeral, she wrote.50 The same messenger contacted the Spaldings. Henry Spalding had cracked some ribs in a recent fall and was not able to travel by horseback, but he, Eliza, and their toddler daughter set off by canoe for the Whitman Mission. They arrived on the afternoon of June 27. Spalding conducted the funeral later that day.
Narcissa had been a doting and anxious mother. Lacking friends, separated from her family, with a husband who was often away from the mission for weeks at a time, her daughter was “the joy and comfort” of her “lonely situation.”51 She hardly let the child out of her arms until Alice Clarissa was almost a year old. She slept with her until just a week before the drowning, when the toddler asked for a bed of her own. Narcissa reluctantly agreed but put the bed right next to her own, so that she could reach out and touch her at any time.
Narcissa sat with her dead child for four days, only agreeing to a burial after the Spaldings arrived and the body had begun to decompose. “She did not begin to change in her appearance much for the three first days,” she wrote in an anguished letter to her parents. “This proved to be a great comfort to me, for so long as she looked natural and was so sweet and I could caress her, I could not bear to have her out of my sight; but when she began to melt away like wax and her visage changed I wished then to put her in so safe, quiet and desirable a resting place as the grave—to see her no more until the morning of the resurrection.”52 The child was buried in a spot north of the house, in a shroud Narcissa made from a gray dress that she had brought with her over the mountains.
The death had at least a temporary mellowing influence on the members of the Oregon Mission. Tensions between Whitman and Spalding, in particular, eased. In an October 15, 1840, letter to David Greene at the American Board, Whitman said that he had been on the verge of leaving the mission because of the strained relationship with Spalding. However, “the Providence of God arrested me in my deliberate determination to do so, by taking away our dear child in so sudden a manner by drowning. Since that time many appearances have changed and I have not seen it my duty to leave.”53
Narcissa drew her grief around her like a shield. She sank into an almost suicidal depression, manifested by frequent bouts of illness, sometimes staying in her room for days at a time. She sent tortured letters to her friends and family. Perhaps God was punishing her for loving Alice Clarissa too much? Had it been a mistake to let her daughter have so much contact with Indians? Just a month before the drowning, a visiting missionary from Hawaii had warned the Whitmans about “the evils” of allowing the child to learn Nez Perce.54 Eventually Narcissa decided that “the Lord saw fit to take her from us” because she could not devote herself to the duties of a missionary without neglecting her daughter and thereby exposing her “to the contaminating influence of heathenism.”55 She made a few desultory attempts to continue teaching Indian students, but soon gave it up. “I am tired of living at this poor dying rate,” she told the wife of a Methodist missionary at The Dalles. “To be a missionary in name and to do so little or nothing for the benefit of heathen souls, is heart-sickening.” Narcissa professed a wish to “do more for their good” but meanwhile walled herself off from Indians as completely as she could.56
She found some diversion by taking in foster children, beginning with Helen Mar Meek, the two-year-old daughter of mountain man Joe Meek and a Nez Perce woman. Meek brought the child to the mission in the fall of 1840 and asked the Whitmans to raise and educate her. A year later, mountain man Jim Bridger sent his mixed-race daughter, Mary Ann, then six, to the mission. The grandmother of a third child, the son of a Walla Walla mother and a Spanish father, left him with the Whitmans in 1842, when he was about three. Narcissa gave him the name David Malin, after a minister she had known in Prattsburg. Finally, in 1844 the Whitmans adopted seven orphans whose emigrant parents, Henry and Naomi Sager, had died on the Oregon Trail. Narcissa kept all the children away from the Cayuse and did not allow any of them to speak a word of Nez Perce.
There was plenty of room for the growing family. In June 1840, a year after Alice Clarissa drowned, the Whitmans moved into a large, T-shaped adobe building, three times the size of the original house and located farther from the riverbank. It was an imposing structure, with smoothly plastered, whitewashed exterior walls, surrounded by a high picket fence. The doors, window frames, and shutters were painted a bright green; the interior walls and ceilings were white; the woodwork was a light slate gray; and the floors and pantry shelves were yellow. The kitchen had a huge hearth, thirteen feet long and eight and a half feet wide. A metal cookstove, installed in 1842, supplemented the cooking that was done over the open hearth. There were five other fireplaces, including one in the Whitmans’ private parlor and bedroom. The building included a spacious living room, a 1,760-square-foot schoolroom, servants’ quarters, a pantry, storerooms, a washroom, and two privies. All the children slept in a large, open loft on the second floor, reached by stairs from the living room.57
Indians were permitted to enter this house through only one door and to be in only one room, originally called Indian Hall. Later, that room would be turned over to emigrants, and Indians would be barred from the Mission House entirely. “They are so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go,” Narcissa complained in a letter to her mother. “We must clean after them, for we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard.”58 She never learned to speak the language of the Cayuse, but she made her contempt for them clear. The fencing, the shutters, and the locked doors were physical manifestations of the emotional distance between the Whitmans and the people they had once hoped to “save.”