CHAPTER SIX:
MUTUAL DISILLUSIONMENT
He demanded of me what I had ever paid him for the land. I answered him “Nothing,” and that I never would give him anything. He then made use of the word “Shame,” which is used in Chinook the same as in English.
—Marcus Whitman to David Greene, November 11, 1841
Relations between the Whitmans and the Cayuse deteriorated quickly after the death of Alice Clarissa. Cayuse leaders—including Tiloukaikt, the “kind, friendly Indian” who had christened the child a “Cayuse te-mi”—confronted Marcus Whitman on several occasions, demanding that he either pay them for occupying their land or leave. Meanwhile, the missionaries resumed their internal sniping. In 1842 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—exasperated by an incessant stream of complaining letters from the four scattered outposts of the Oregon Mission—recalled Henry Spalding and ordered Whitman to leave Waiilatpu and join the group at Tshimakain (near present-day Spokane). Whitman made a dangerous midwinter journey back to Boston, hoping to persuade board members to change their minds. He returned a year later with the first large wagon train on the Oregon Trail. From that point on, the Whitmans maintained only a pretense of ministering to Indians and focused instead on promoting the colonization of Oregon Country by American settlers.
“Til-au-kite, or The Man in the Act of Alighting,” by Paul Kane. The artist visited Cayuse leader Tiloukaikt in his lodge near the Whitman Mission in July 1847 and produced this sketch. The drawing depicts an older man, with a somewhat weary and pensive look, quite unlike the nearly naked, menacing figure in Kane’s painting of “Tilli-koit,” (page 184) based on the sketch but completed years later. Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas; 31.78.59.
Some of the tension between the missionaries and the Cayuse could be traced back to promises made by the Rev. Samuel Parker, the Bible-thumping Ithaca preacher who convinced the American Board to send him and Whitman on a reconnaissance mission to Oregon in 1835. The two traveled with the American Fur Company to the rendezvous in Wyoming and then parted ways, Whitman returning east to recruit other missionaries, Parker continuing west “to ascertain by personal observation the condition and characters of the Indian tribes, and the facilities for introducing the gospel among them.”1 A fussy, imperious man in his late fifties, Parker spent the winter of 1835–36 at Fort Vancouver as a guest of chief factor John McLoughlin, head of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast Columbia District. McLoughlin’s motives were not entirely altruistic. Befriending American missionaries was one way to defuse criticism of the company’s hard-nosed efforts to undercut its American competitors in the fur business.
In April 1836, Parker met with three leaders of the Walla Walla Cayuse band—Umtippe (sometimes recorded as Hiyumtipin), an elder; his brother, Waptashtakmahl (also known as Feathercap); and Tiloukaikt—at the place where the Whitmans ultimately built their mission. Parker was accompanied by Pierre Pambrun, head trader at Fort Walla Walla, and John Toupin, the fort’s French Canadian interpreter. According to Toupin, Parker told the headmen: “I come to select a place for a mission but I do not intend to take your lands for nothing,” explaining that “a big ship” would arrive every year, loaded with goods that would be given—not sold—to the Indians in return for the use of the land. Parker then traveled north to the Lapwai area, where he made the same promises to the Nez Perce. “Next spring there will come a missionary to establish himself here and take a piece of land,” Parker reportedly said, “but he will not take it for nothing; you shall be paid every year; this is the American fashion.”2
Rather than meeting Whitman and his companions at the rendezvous that summer, as planned, Parker abruptly ended his “exploring tour” and returned to Fort Vancouver. He sailed from there to New York via Hawaii and was back in Ithaca by May 1837. He left no useful information for Whitman or Spalding; they had to search for mission sites on their own. His never-fulfilled promise of annual payments to the Indians became a source of growing discord as the years went on.
Fundamental cultural differences contributed to the increasing friction between the missionaries and their hosts. The Cayuse customarily had free access to each other’s lodges; the Whitmans put up fences and locked their doors to keep the Indians out. Narcissa, in particular, fought to retain the standards of privacy she had enjoyed in her middle-class New York home. Barriers to free entry offended Indian ideas about community. The Cayuse refused to give up the seasonal mobility that anchored their traditional way of life. “Their being absent so much of the time is exceedingly trying to us,” Narcissa complained.3
Gift-giving was an essential part of social and political interaction in Cayuse life; the missionaries regarded the practice as extortion. The Whitmans had scarcely settled in at Waiilatpu when Umtippe called on them, for what he probably supposed would be an exchange of gifts. Narcissa expressed outrage. “A few days ago he took it into his head to require pay for teaching us the language,” she wrote to her parents. “He is a mortal beggar as all Indians are.” The letter was dated January 2, 1837. She had been living among Indians for less than a month.4
Cayuse men scoffed when they saw Whitman and his hired hands building houses at the mission. Constructing shelters was a task for women in Indian society. The way Whitman treated his wife disturbed some Indians too. Tiloukaikt told him he was setting a bad example by allowing Narcissa to travel with him on social calls and deferring to her in public. The missionaries, for their part, thought Indian men treated their women like slaves. Polygamy was an established part of Plateau culture. Having multiple wives indicated a man’s high status and added to the family’s economic security, since women gathered much of the food. To the missionaries, polygamy was a sign of moral depravity, along with gambling, horse racing, and many other aspects of traditional Cayuse life.5
As religious evangelists, the missionaries tried to impose a rigid, restrictive belief system on people who were essentially religious synthesizers. The Indians were willing to graft new ideas onto old beliefs, but not to abandon old beliefs altogether. The missionaries insisted that they shrug off all the remnants of their old spiritual lives and be reborn into entirely new ones, based on baffling Calvinistic concepts of original sin and predestination. Whitman tried to tell the Cayuse that they were “lost, ruined & condemned” and prayer alone would not save them.6 It was not enough to simply go to church, lead good lives, and pray every day. They could avoid the horrors of hell only by recognizing that they were essentially wicked, doomed by the fall of Adam; accepting their guilt, and offering their souls to Christ for complete regeneration. Narcissa summarized their reaction in a letter to her father: “They feel so bad, disappointed, and some of them angry…. Some threaten to whip him [Marcus] and to destroy our crops, and for a long time their cattle were turned onto our potato field every night to see if they could not compel him to change his course of instruction with them.”7
There were many conflicts over the issue of property. From the Indian perspective the houses, tools, livestock, crops, even the clothing worn by the missionaries represented great wealth, and those who possessed great wealth were obliged to share it with those who had less. Historian Larry Cebula has written that white ideas about the ownership of crops would have been foreign to people “accustomed to helping themselves to the bounties of the earth.”8 The Whitmans, however, considered themselves mere stewards of property that was actually owned by the American Board; they balked at giving any of it away and sometimes went to drastic lengths to prevent Indians from “stealing” anything, including food. In one notorious instance in 1841, William Henry Gray (who had returned to Waiilatpu to help build more housing at the mission complex) injected tartar emetic into some ripe watermelons and placed them in a field as bait. A few Indians ate the melons and were sickened. Gray joked about it. Archibald McKinlay, chief trader at Fort Walla Walla that year, said later that “the melon affair” was a turning point in Cayuse attitudes toward Whitman. “After that,” McKinlay wrote, “they began to suspect he was a dangerous medicine man.”9 Although it was Gray who poisoned the melons, Whitman got the blame. Whitman himself was known to put out meat laced with strychnine or arsenic to poison wolves to protect his livestock, especially his sheep. He supposedly warned the Indians not to eat the meat, but the warnings alone could have contributed to the impression that he had lethal forces at his command. And on at least one occasion, according to one of Whitman’s employees, several Indians sampled the poisoned meat and nearly died.10
Whitman’s status as a medicine man, or te-wat, was a recurring issue. In his initial meeting with Cayuse leaders, Samuel Parker described Whitman as “a sorcerer of great power” who would be coming soon to Cayuse country. The comment was intended to awe the Indians. It ended up becoming, in Whitman’s words, “a cause of much anxiety to me.”11 In Plateau culture, a te-wat was recognized as having supernatural powers that could be used to cure the ill or, in certain circumstances, to kill. It was considered acceptable, even mandatory, to take the life of a te-wat whose patients died, on the grounds that his (or her) power to heal had somehow been corrupted.12 Whitman was well aware of Cayuse attitudes toward healers who failed to heal. He and Narcissa had been living at Waiilatpu for less than six months when Umtippe brought his wife to the mission for treatment of what Whitman diagnosed as “inflammation of the lungs” (possibly pneumonia). Umtippe warned Whitman that if his wife died, he would kill him. “It has been, and still is the case with them, when one dies in your care they will hold you responsible for his life, and you are in great danger of being killed,” Narcissa wrote shortly afterward.13
Umtippe’s wife recovered, possibly despite (rather than because of) Whitman’s treatment. His medical arsenal consisted chiefly of calomel, a purgative that would have contributed to dehydration and made most sick people sicker; tincture of iodine, taken internally as a cure-all for everything from bronchitis to gangrene; a mercury-based compound called “blue mass” or “blue pills”; and bleeding. Still, Indians often came to Whitman, demanding medicine or asking to be bled—practices they apparently associated with white man’s power. Narcissa occasionally dispensed pills when Marcus was away from the mission, giving her something of the aura of a te-wat as well. Both Whitmans would find themselves in danger a few years later, when a measles epidemic struck the Walla Walla Valley. While most of the whites in their care then recovered, they couldn’t keep Indians from dying.
The Cayuse and their Nez Perce relatives confronted Whitman and his colleagues on several occasions in the early 1840s, clearly expressing the feeling that they were not reaping the rewards, spiritual or material, that they had expected when they invited missionaries into their communities. On one occasion a group of Nez Perces angrily told missionary Asa Smith to pay for the use of the land at his mission at Kamiah or leave. Indians living near Spalding’s station at Lapwai destroyed the dam used to power the waterwheel at his newly completed sawmill, and destroyed it again after he rebuilt it. A Nez Perce leader known as Old James stood up during a Sunday service at Lapwai to say the missionaries were making the people miserable and ruining their lives, instead of helping to make what had been good lives better.
Whitman was the target of the most overt acts of hostility. He detailed some of them in a 5,055-word letter to the American Board in 1841. In one incident a Cayuse named Tilkanaiks deliberately turned some of his horses into the cornfield at Waiilatpu. When Whitman protested, the Indian “demanded of me what I had ever given him for the land. I answered ‘Nothing,’ and that I never would give him anything. He then made use of the word ‘Shame,’ which is used in Chinook the same as in English.” Then Tilkanaiks punched Whitman, twice, hard, on the chest. A few days later, several Cayuses forced their way into the main Mission House, broke windows, and smashed the kitchen door. One yanked Whitman’s collar, tore his clothes, and hit him in the mouth with his fist.
Another time, Tiloukaikt approached Whitman and tugged on the missionary’s ears, first one, then the other—perhaps a gesture meaning that Whitman must open his ears and listen. Not happy with the response, Tiloukaikt pulled the hat from Whitman’s head and threw it into the mud. Whitman, in turn-the-other-cheek mode, put the dripping hat back on his head. They went through this routine three times. Whitman insisted there would be no concessions. The missionaries would not pay for land or timber; they would not allow the Indians to enter the Mission House through any door and go into any room they wanted; and they would not stop expanding the mission. Archibald McKinlay sent his interpreter to calm things down. Waptashtakmahl (Feathercap), one of the leaders who had met with Samuel Parker years earlier, indicated that it was customary to settle arguments by distributing gifts, as a goodwill gesture. Whitman, in a remarkable display of arrogance and intransigence, said he wouldn’t give away a single awl or pin.14
Whitman blamed the Indians’ “agitation” on Catholics. Two Catholic priests—François N. Blanchet and Modeste Demers, both Jesuits from Quebec—had arrived at Fort Walla Walla in 1838. They celebrated mass; blessed the marriage of Pierre Pambrun and his métis wife, Catherine; baptized three of their children; and met with Walla Walla and Cayuse tribal members before going on to Fort Vancouver. Demers returned in the summer of 1839, proselytizing and baptizing Indians throughout the region. To the Whitmans, “Papist” priests represented a threat secondary only to paganism itself. “The conflict has begun—what trials await us we know not,” wrote Narcissa.15
The French Canadian Catholics were markedly more successful in converting Indians than their American Protestant counterparts. The priests had been invited to Oregon by the Hudson’s Bay Company (many of whose employees and executives were Catholic) and thus benefited from association with an organization the Indians knew and respected. Also, as single men, they were more mobile than missionaries with families. They could accompany Indians on their seasonal rounds, which gave them more time to learn native languages and customs. This approach meant that the priests became “culturally steeped, like Catholic teabags” and may account for their ability to repackage Catholicism in ways that appealed to Indians.16 Perhaps above all, they won converts by being willing to baptize anyone who wanted baptism. The Protestant missionaries, in contrast, withheld baptism until potential converts demonstrated proof of complete conversion and rebirth—“an entire change of heart.”17 In the eleven-year tenure of the Whitman Mission, not a single local Indian was ever deemed worthy of baptism.
A useful tool for the Catholics in the battle for Indian souls was a visual aid that Blanchet devised to illustrate the steps to salvation. His “Catholic ladder” consisted of lines and symbols carved onto a long, narrow board, originally called a Sahale stick (“stick from heaven” in Chinook Jargon). It depicted Protestantism as a withered branch of Christianity, falling into the flames of hell. In response, Henry Spalding designed and his wife Eliza drew and painted a Protestant ladder, showing Martin Luther leading the way to heaven and the Pope as the Antichrist, roasting in hell. Each version implied that damnation awaited converts to the other’s faith.
Oregon Country became a landscape of competition. The interdenominational rivalry between Catholics and Protestants was mirrored in the rivalry between the United States and Great Britain over the northwest boundary between the United States and British-owned Canada. The Americans wanted the border set at the forty-ninth parallel; Great Britain wanted it to be drawn farther south, along the Columbia River. The two nations had signed a treaty of joint occupation in 1818 and amended it in 1827 but did not finally settle the border dispute until 1846. Neither country acknowledged that the land was already occupied by peoples whose ancestors had lived there for thousands of years. “While the missionaries vied for their souls, the U.S. and Britain vied for land,” one historian commented.18 Meanwhile, the Hudson’s Bay Company competed with American companies for furs and other resources extracted from the land. As Confederated Tribes scholar and member Roberta Conner put it in 2009: “There’s a resource competition going on, there’s a land competition going on, there’s a philosophical or theological competition going on, and we’re just in the middle of all of it.”19
The grim truce that the American Board’s missionaries had cobbled together after Alice Clarissa’s death soon unraveled. Long, bickering letters from Oregon piled up on the desk of board secretary David Greene in Boston. The complaints ranged from the petty (a dispute over a milk cow) to the poisonous (overlapping accusations of mismanagement, incompetence, lying, and theft). Whitman said either he or Spalding had to go. William Henry Gray threatened to leave if he could not have a mission of his own. In one particularly venomous series of rants, Asa Smith claimed Spalding was insane. He accused Spalding of deliberately exaggerating the number of Indians in the Northwest and their interest in Christianity to gain support from unsuspecting church groups in the East, urged the board to recall both Spalding and Gray, and suggested that it close down the entire operation and sell everything to the Methodists.
By 1842 the American Board had had enough. It ordered Spalding to return home, advised Smith and Gray to do the same, and told Whitman to close his mission at Waiilatpu and move, with Cornelius Rogers, north to the station at Tshimakain. David Greene wrote that the board was “deeply grieved” by “the divisions and contradictions, the want of confidence in each other and the want of fraternal intercourse.” It was evident “that your company cannot live and labor together, and that the mission must either be abandoned, or new men must be sent in to the field to take your places.” The missionaries were setting a bad example for traders and others in the region through their internecine quarreling, and the board was embarrassed by their behavior.20
When Greene wrote those words, in February 1842, missionaries Smith and Rogers had already resigned and Gray was preparing to leave as well. The remaining members of the Oregon Mission had pledged comity and brotherhood and sent letters to that effect to Boston. Under the best of circumstances it took six months for correspondence from one coast to reach the other, and an equal amount of time for a reply to be received. News of the ceasefire reached Greene two months after he had sent out the orders to break up the mission. He dashed off another letter, telling Whitman and Spalding to carry on as usual. By the time that letter reached Oregon, Whitman was on his way to Boston to persuade the board to rescind an order it had already rescinded.
Whitman had received Greene’s initial directive on September 14, 1842, when Elijah White, a former Methodist missionary, showed up at Waiilatpu and handed it to him. White, a medical doctor from New York with an unflinching sense of self-importance, had been kicked out of the Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley in 1841. He returned east by ship and ended up in Washington, DC, where he somehow convinced the War Department to appoint him as “sub-Indian agent for Oregon,” even though the federal government had no legal authority to do anything in Oregon. White arrived at Waiilatpu as part of the first substantial group of emigrants to cross the Rockies, about 125 men, women, and children, bound for the Willamette Valley. In addition to the instructions from the American Board, White brought news that a Missouri senator had introduced a bill offering every settler who made it to Oregon the right to claim a whole section of land, 640 acres, free and clear. The offer was made, of course, without the knowledge or approval of any of the indigenous inhabitants of the land. The bill never passed, but it dangled like a beacon in front of land-hungry would-be emigrants.
Whitman called an emergency meeting of his remaining associates. They agreed that he should go to Boston as quickly as possible and plead for a second chance to maintain the stations at Waiilatpu and Lapwai. He left on October 3, 1842, accompanied by Asa L. Lovejoy, a Massachusetts-born lawyer who had just arrived in Oregon (with Elijah White’s party); an Indian guide; and a dog named Trapper. Whitman was in such a hurry that he forgot to pack his comb, pencil, journal, and compass.21 The three men pushed eastward, through snowstorms and icy rivers, to Fort Hall, then cut south, taking a thousand-mile detour to the Santa Fe Trail for fear of alleged “Indian trouble.” At one point, out of food, they ate the dog. They averaged a then-record-setting sixty miles a day for 150 days, despite being immobilized by occasional blizzards and refusing to travel on Sundays.
Narcissa, back at Waiilatpu, lasted less than a week on her own. In a lengthy, disjointed letter to her husband, she claimed that an Indian had tried to break into her bedroom three nights after Marcus left. She said she had been asleep when someone shoved against her door and tried to unlatch it, and only her hysterical screams had driven off the assailant and “delivered me from the hand of a savage man.” Afterward, she insisted that one of the Hawaiian hired hands move his bedding into the kitchen, to be closer to her room if needed.22 There is no evidence to corroborate Narcissa’s account of what happened that night. Biographer Julie Roy Jeffrey has pointed out that Narcissa was always anxious about sleeping alone; she could have imagined or dreamed the whole thing.23 None of her fellow whites in Oregon Country, however, ever doubted that she had been the target of an attempted rape.
Real or imagined, the incident gave Narcissa an excuse to leave the mission. She sent word to Archibald McKinlay at Fort Walla Walla. He came himself to take her to the fort in a wagon. She traveled most of the twenty-five miles lying down in a trundle bed in the back, prostrated, it would seem, by remembered terror. Her three young Euro-Indian wards—Mary Ann Bridger, seven; Helen Mar Meek, four; and David Malin, perhaps four—came along too. Spalding arranged to have William Geiger, another newly arrived emigrant, live at the Whitman Mission and take care of the property. Narcissa, less content with the rustic accommodations at Fort Walla Walla than she had once been, gratefully accepted an invitation to move in with the Methodist missionaries at The Dalles. She and the two young girls, traveling in a Hudson’s Bay boat, arrived there on October 29, 1842. She left the boy at Fort Walla Walla. Except for a brief visit in May 1843, Narcissa did not return to Waiilatpu during the entire year that Marcus was gone.
Within weeks of Marcus Whitman’s departure for Boston, rumors began to circulate among the Cayuse about the purpose of his trip. Some said he had gone east to get soldiers who would force the Indians off the land and enslave them; others said he had gone to get poison to kill them all. The Cayuse had heard stories from Iroquois and Algonquian people about lives lost to disease and land lost to greed when Americans came into their ancestral lands. A Delaware Indian known as Tom Hill or Delaware Tom warned the Nez Perce, who warned the Cayuse, that the missionaries would bring in many more whites who would take land and not pay for it.24 “They have heard that you have gone home and are coming back next fall with fifty men to fight them,” Narcissa reported in a letter to her husband, sent to him in care of David Greene in Boston.25 The rumors fed on each other, in a petri dish of suspicion and distrust.
William Geiger, the caretaker at Waiilatpu, sent alarming reports about “the excitement” to Narcissa at the Methodist mission. He said some of the young Cayuse were talking about going to war against “the Bostons” (a term for Americans) and were held back only by the counsel of older men. Frissons of panic spread from the missionaries at The Dalles to Oregon City, the center of white settlement in the Willamette Valley, and to Elijah White, newly ensconced there as the dubiously commissioned “sub-Indian agent.” Oregon City, near the falls of the Willamette River, was a hamlet of perhaps seventy people. Nervous residents demanded that White either fortify the town to fend off an attack or gather a militia and march inland to subdue the restive Cayuse by force. “If words would not answer,” Narcissa wrote to Mary Walker, at the American Board’s mission at Tshimakain, the plan was to “make powder and balls do it.”26
Elijah White arrived at the Whitman Mission in late May 1843 for a council with the Cayuse and Walla Walla. He had held a similar meeting with the Nez Perce at Lapwai five months earlier. White’s objective in both cases was twofold: to impose “laws” protecting missionaries and other white people; and to convince the Indians to adopt a system of leadership that would make it easier for whites to deal with them. Joining him at Waiilatpu were a reluctant Narcissa, two of her Methodist hosts, and Henry Spalding, who traveled down from Lapwai with a large party of Nez Perces. Two Christianized Nez Perce leaders, known to whites as Ellis and Lawyer, served as the main interpreters.
An estimated three hundred Cayuse and Walla Walla men showed up to hear what Elijah White had to say. He began by asking them to accept the “Laws of the Nez Perces,” so-called because they had been nominally adopted by the Nez Perce during the council at Lapwai. Spalding, who had probably written most of the “laws” himself, had printed them in an eight-page booklet. The list ran to eleven. The interpreters read them out loud. Article 1: “Whoever willfully takes life shall be hung.” Article 2: “Whoever burns a dwelling house shall be hung.” Most of the rest were aimed at curbing behavior the missionaries found annoying. Article 5 prohibited anyone from entering a dwelling without permission from the occupant. Article 6 made minor theft (valued at less than one beaver pelt) punishable by twenty-five lashes; the penalty for major theft was fifty lashes. Article 8 stipulated: “If anyone enter a field, and injure the crops, or throw down the fence, so that cattle or horses go in and do damage, he shall pay all damages, and receive 25 lashes for every offense.” Under Article 9 only those who “travel or live among the game” could have dogs, and if a dog killed any domestic animal, the owner would have to pay damages and kill the dog. (Spalding was obsessive about keeping Indian dogs away from his sheep.) Article 11 required: “If an Indian break these laws, he shall be punished by his chiefs; if a white man break them, he shall be reported to the agent, and be punished at his instance.”27 The difference in wording was subtle but significant. Punishment for any violation of the rules by white people would be at the discretion of Elijah White or his successor as “agent.”
Clues about the Indians’ reactions to this presentation can be found in an account by Rev. Gustavus Hines, one of the two Methodist missionaries who witnessed it. According to Hines, the first comments came from PeoPeoMoxMox, a prominent Walla Walla leader (also known as Yellow Bird), who asked: “Where are these laws from? Are they from God or from the earth? I would think you might say, they were from God. But I think they are from the earth, because, from what I know of white men, they do not honor these laws.” A Cayuse identified as “the Prince” said the laws reminded him of all the unfulfilled promises made to him and his fathers. White people had been coming into the country for a long time, he said, always promising to do good, “but they had all passed by and left no blessing behind them.” Tauitau (also spelled Tawatoy), a headman from a large Cayuse band on the Umatilla River, “appeared quite angry, and disposed to quarrel.” But there were others who spoke in favor of accepting the laws, and after two days of discussion, the headmen essentially shrugged and apparently agreed.28
Elijah White’s other objective was to get the Cayuse and Walla Walla to adopt a centralized power structure, with a “principal chief” at the top; below him, a network of “subordinate chiefs,” representing individual villages; and below them, “officers” who would enforce commands coming from the top—like a corporate flow chart.29 It was a completely foreign concept to Plateau peoples. The Nez Perce, for example, were less a “tribe” than a collection of roughly forty autonomous bands, connected by language and culture but each with its own system of leadership. The Cayuse were divided into at least nine bands (some sources say as many as nineteen). Membership was fluid and leadership diffuse, situational, and limited. It was unfathomable to give one person authority over everyone. Still, Elijah White insisted that the Indians pick a “chief.” The Cayuse finally seemed to consent to the selection of Five Crows, Tauitau’s older half-brother. With that, White gave the Indians an ox, and Narcissa contributed a hog. The animals were butchered and everyone—about six hundred men, women, and children—sat down for a feast. Ellis, the Nez Perce “chief,” passed around a pipe to close the ceremonies. Then the Indians and the white people went their separate ways. “In the evening all was still,” Hines wrote, “and, walking out to the camping ground where the fires were still blazing, I found but one solitary old Indian, who was boiling up the feet of the ox for his next day’s supplies.”30
The conference might have seemed a pointless exercise. White had no authority to impose any “laws.” There were no “chiefs” who could enforce them. As historian Elliott West has noted, several days of discussion with a white man were not going to overturn “a social order seasoned for centuries.”31 But there would be consequences. Two years later, PeoPeoMoxMox sought justice under the “Laws of the Nez Perces” for the death of his eldest son, christened Elijah Hedding by the Methodist missionaries who had educated him. The young man spoke English, professed Christianity, and was admired by both whites and Indians. He was shot and killed by a white man in a dispute over a mule during a cattle-buying trip to California. White, purveyor of the “laws” that PeoPeoMoxMox tried to invoke, expressed sympathy for the death of “this educated and accomplished young chief” but said he could do nothing to punish the perpetrator. He called on Ellis, the designated Nez Perce “high chief,” to smooth things over but concluded, with some prescience: “There might be much difficulty in settling the affair.”32 The degree to which he was right is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
Narcissa left Waiilatpu the day after the council ended. In letters to her family and friends, she said Elijah White, acting as a medical doctor, had insisted she go to Fort Vancouver and put herself under the care of Dr. Forbes Barclay, “an eminent physician” newly arrived from Scotland. She shrouded the guilt she might have felt for not staying at the mission by writing at length about her various ailments: stomach pains, bowel pains, headaches, rheumatic pains, fatigue, kidney problems, failing eyesight, a persistent pain in her side, “prolapses,” even “a beating tumour which is liable to burst and extinguish life at any moment.”33 Depression may have accounted for much of her poor health. Or perhaps, as her biographer suggests, she simply “used invalidism as a means of escaping from some of the difficulties of her situation”—like many women of her class in the mid-nineteenth century.34
Narcissa spent a pleasant two months at Fort Vancouver. Barclay told her that the source of her problems was an “enlargement” of her right ovary. He prescribed iodine (taken internally, a popular medical shot in the dark at the time), rest, and light recreation. Feeling “very much improved by his kind attentions,” Narcissa left Fort Vancouver in July 1843 for a sojourn with the Methodists at their main mission station on the Willamette River near present-day Salem.35 She took a side trip with Jason Lee, head of the Methodist operations in Oregon, to Astoria (then called Fort George), to enjoy “the benefit of a sea breeze” and say goodbye to a group of Americans set to sail back to New York on a Hudson’s Bay Company ship. She also visited a nearby Methodist satellite station at Clatsop. “My beloved parents may think it strange that I should wander about the country so much when my dear husband is absent,” she wrote, in one of several self-justifying letters home. “It serves to occupy my mind…and besides this, journeying is beneficial to my health.”36
Back in the Willamette Valley, Narcissa enjoyed what she would later tell her father were some of the happiest moments in her life. The highlight was a four-day camp meeting—the kind of emotionladen revival she had loved while growing up in Prattsburg. It was “a precious season” that “filled me with joy inexpressible.” She was in the midst of a second “protracted meeting” at Willamette Falls when word came that her husband had returned and would be waiting for her at The Dalles.37 Her ambivalence was unmistakable: relief, on the one hand, that he had survived a hazardous journey; and dread, on the other hand, because it meant she would be going back to “dwell among the heathen” in a “dreary land of heathenish darkness.”38 She had been living with white people for more than a year, “free from any distracting cares of my family and the station.” There had been no Indians peeking into her windows, no endless cycle of chores awaiting her.39
Narcissa had begged her sister Jane to come west with Marcus on his return trip and was bitterly disappointed to find that she had not. Whitman had brought only one family member with him: his thirteen-year-old nephew, Perrin. With an obviously heavy heart, Narcissa left the Willamette for The Dalles in late September 1843 for a reunion with her husband and her foster children. From there, “I turned my face with my husband toward this dark spot [Waiilatpu] and dark, indeed, it seemed to me when compared with the scenes, social and religious, which I had so recently been enjoying with so much zest.”40
Whitman had stumbled into Boston six months earlier, ragged, stinky, frostbitten, and not particularly welcome. David Greene scolded him for leaving his station, gave him some money for new clothes, and told him to come back after he had cleaned up. It turned out that the American Board’s Prudential Committee had reversed itself once again and reimposed its original order to shut down the missions at Waiilatpu and Lapwai. That decision was made largely on the basis of finances: facing a deficit of $80,000 in 1843, the American Board was in no mood to finance activities that seemed fruitless. A more presentable Whitman made his case to the committee on April 4, 1843. He argued that Waiilatpu was a strategic rest stop and supply station for travelers to Oregon and that “Papists” (Catholics) would take it over if the Protestants abandoned it. Also, he and Spalding could “do more for the civilization and social improvement” of the Indians if they did not have to spend so much time working to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families. After several days of deliberation, the committee reversed itself once again and agreed that Whitman and Spalding could continue their operations. It also gave Whitman permission to essentially sublease mission property to “a small company of intelligent and pious laymen,” who could take over the farming at both stations, manage the livestock, operate the mills and the shops, and relieve the missionaries of the “great amount of manual labor which is now necessary for their subsistence”—but only if it could be done without any expense to the American Board.41
Whitman spent about six weeks in the East. En route to Boston, he had stopped in Washington, DC, where he met with James Porter, the new secretary of war. He later sent Porter a proposed bill that would have established a line of military posts stretching to Oregon, each surrounded by a farming community to provide food for travelers, with a blacksmith shop to repair wagons and reshoe horses, and other businesses catering to emigrants. He also envisioned a pony express for mail service to all these new communities in the West. In New York City, Whitman had an interview with Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, who called him “the roughest man we have seen this many a day,” but also “a man fitted to be a chief in rearing a moral empire among the wild men of the wilderness.”42 Whitman visited members of his family and Narcissa’s, spoke in a number of churches, raised a little money, and tirelessly evangelized for the settlement of Oregon by the righteous. He was in Massachusetts and New York during a period of increasingly intense debate about slavery, but he made no mention of it in any of his surviving correspondence. As he prepared for his return journey, he sent a letter to one of Narcissa’s brothers. “It is now decided in my mind that Oregon will be occupied by American citizens,” he wrote. “Those who go only open the way for more.”43
He arranged to take his nephew, Perrin (the son of Whitman’s recently widowed brother, Samuel) back to Oregon with him. By mid-May 1843 the two of them were in Saint Louis, where they joined a wagon train organized by Peter H. Burnett, a Missouri lawyer with a pile of debts and dreams of escaping them in Oregon.44 The train included one hundred twenty wagons, at least eight hundred and possibly as many as one thousand emigrants, and from three thousand to five thousand horses, mules, oxen, and cattle. It was so large that the assemblage soon split into two. Jesse Applegate, another Missourian, led the second, slower group. Although Whitman was not involved in organizing this wagon train, he played a key role in its success by convincing its leaders that the wagons could be driven all the way to Oregon.
The first of the wagons rolled into the Whitman Mission in late September 1843. The watching Cayuse must have been stunned. Charles Wilkes, commander of the United States Exploring Expedition, estimated that there were only about eleven hundred Indians in the entire Walla Walla Valley when he led a naval squadron to the region in 1842. The number of emigrants on the trail the next year was equal to 80 to 90 percent of that population. To borrow an analogy from historian Elliott West, for people in Boston the equivalent would have been more than seventy-five thousand western Indians marching through that city on their way to settle in Cape Cod.45
Most of the emigrants quickly moved on to the Willamette Valley, but when Marcus returned to the Whitman Mission with Narcissa in early November 1843, the complex was crammed with people. The only unoccupied room in the large Mission House was the dining room. A couple from Illinois and their newborn infant had settled into the Whitmans’ bedroom; a family of seven and a bachelor were packed into the one-time “Indian Hall”; a couple with four young children had claimed a room off the kitchen; and a French Canadian man was sleeping in the kitchen. All together, there were twenty-six people in the Mission House and another twelve in a one-and-a-half-story dwelling that would soon become known as the Emigrant House. One man was bedded down in the blacksmith shop. The evening meal on Narcissa’s first day back was a dramatic reminder of the relative comfort she had left behind. It consisted of cornmeal mush with a little milk, potatoes, and tea. The newcomers had bought or stolen and eaten nearly everything else.
A trickle of emigrants (13 in 1840) became a stream (24 in 1841), then a river (112 in 1842), and then a flood. Discouraged by his lack of progress in converting Indians, Whitman found a new mission. “I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country,” he wrote to Narcissa’s parents. “The Indians have in no case obeyed the command to multiply and replenish the earth, and they cannot stand in the way of others doing so.”46