CHAPTER SEVEN:
EXPLOSION OF GRIEF AND VIOLENCE
The Cayuse watched with increasing alarm and resentment as more and more whites moved through their territory, using up scarce firewood, killing game without permission, and depleting grasses needed for Indian horses and cattle. Between 1843 and 1847 nearly ten thousand settlers traveled overland to Oregon Country in rut-making wagon trains. Most bypassed the Whitman Mission after 1844, using a more direct route to the Willamette Valley, but hundreds still detoured to rest and recover at Waiilatpu. More outbuildings were added to the mission complex, more fields fenced in. The Whitmans retreated from missionary work to focus almost exclusively on supporting the emigrants. Cayuse leaders warned Marcus Whitman that he was, in effect, violating his lease. “His expressed purpose for being with the Cayuse was to teach them about the Christian religion,” Antone Minthorn, former chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, wrote in a tribal history. “But he brought more people, developed more land, and brought sickness that killed many Cayuse.”1
Whitman ignored the warnings. He had come to believe that American colonization of Oregon Country was inevitable, even divinely ordained. Like the biblical Canaanites, the Indians had ignored the dictates of the Lord and would have to forfeit their lands. “I am fully convinced that when a people refuse or neglect to fill the designs of Providence, they ought not to complain at the results,” he wrote in a letter to Narcissa’s parents, “and it is equally useless for Christians to be anxious on their account.”2 In other words, the Indians were doomed and Christians shouldn’t worry about it.
Whitman was delighted when mountain men Robert Newell and Joe Meek showed up at Waiilatpu in September 1840 with three mostly intact wagons—the first ones to be driven over the Blue Mountains and into the Walla Walla Valley. The two men, accompanied by their Indian wives and children and two other trappers, had used mules to haul the wagons to the Whitman Mission from Fort Hall, some 450 miles to the east, over steep, rocky terrain. They arrived “in a rather rough and reduced state,” Newell wrote, “quite sorry that we had undertaken the job.” Whitman insisted they would never regret it. “You have broken the ice,” he reportedly told Newell, “and when others see that wagons have passed, they, too, will pass, and in a few years the valley will be full of our people.”3
Whitman was proud of his role in encouraging “our people” to settle in Oregon Country. He boasted that he had “eminently aided the Government,” first by bringing two white women over the Rocky Mountains in 1836, paving the way for many others to follow; and then by guiding the first major wagon train through the Blue Mountains and into the Walla Walla Valley in 1843, using the rudimentary road that Newell and Meek had carved out earlier.4 The subsequent influx of Americans tilted the boundary dispute with Great Britain in favor of the United States in 1846. Whitman took credit for that too. “By means of the establishment of the wagon road,” he wrote, “the present acquired rights of U. States by her Citizens hung.”5
Midwestern farmers, battered by financial panics in 1837 and 1841, packed up and headed west in growing numbers. Missouri senator Lewis Linn sponsored a bill in 1841 granting free land in Oregon to anyone who could travel across the Rockies to claim it. The bill never passed—Great Britain and the United States were still arguing over the boundary then—but it raised hopes that similar legislation would soon be adopted. Newspapers from New England to the Midwest sang the glories of Oregon. “There is the place to build anew the Temple of Democracy,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer declared. The editor of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript called Oregon “the pioneer’s land of promise.” The Ohio Statesman claimed that “Oregon fever is raging in almost every part of the Union.”6
Among the estimated fifteen hundred Americans who left their homes and set out for Oregon in 1844 were seven children who would arrive at Waiilatpu as orphans. Their father, Henry Sager, a restless man, had moved his family from Ohio to Indiana to eastern Missouri and then to western Missouri before deciding to try his luck in Oregon. Their mother, Naomi, pregnant with a seventh child, was probably not happy about yet another move—the family’s third in four years. She gave birth while they were on the trail, somewhere in Kansas. It was a difficult delivery, and Naomi never fully recovered. Henry died, probably of typhoid, on the Green River in Wyoming in August. Naomi died a month later, in southern Idaho. A middle-aged German known as “Dr. Dagon,” aided by women on the train, took charge of the children: John, age thirteen; Francis (also known as Frank), twelve; Catherine, nine; Elizabeth, seven; Matilda, five; Hannah Louise, three; and the baby, four months old. Several women who had infants of their own took turns serving as wet nurses for the baby.
Wagon train captain William Shaw escorted the six older orphans to the Whitman Mission on November 6, 1844. One of the women brought the baby a few days later. The Whitmans had mixed feelings about becoming foster parents to such a large brood. Marcus wanted the boys but not the girls, especially not the baby. Narcissa wanted the girls, especially the baby, “as a charm to bind the rest to me.”7 In the end the Whitmans agreed to take all the Sager children, at least for a while. Catherine, the oldest girl, described the scene when the children finally met their new guardians. Two worn-out oxen pulled the remnants of the family’s wagon, reduced to a two-wheeled cart, into the yard in front of the Mission House. John, sitting on the cart, wept bitterly. Francis stood next to him, his arm on a wheel, sobbing. The girls, bare-headed and bare-footed, huddled together, “looking first at the boys and then at the house, dreading we knew not what.” They were dirty, ragged, malnourished, and sunburned. When Narcissa, dressed in dark calico and a gingham sunbonnet, smiled at them, “we thought she was the prettiest woman we had ever seen.”8
Narcissa gave up all pretense about being a missionary to Indians after the Sager children’s arrival. She had not been actively engaged in such work for several years, but evidently felt some guilt about that, judging from her many efforts to rationalize it in letters to her family and friends. Her health was too “feeble”; the challenges of “getting a living” made it impossible to do much for “the benefit of heathen souls”; taking care of “weary, way-worn” emigrants was as important—if not more so—than anything else she and Marcus could be doing.9 “When my health failed, I was obliged to withhold my efforts for the natives,” she told her mother. But now, “the Lord has filled my hands with other labors.”10
The seven new foster children became the focus of Narcissa’s life. She was particularly devoted to the baby, named Rosanna at birth but renamed Henrietta Naomi, to honor the child’s parents, at the request of her siblings. It’s easy to imagine that Narcissa saw, in the white infant, a replacement for the daughter she had lost five years earlier. In any case, she forged closer bonds with the Sager orphans than with any of the three métis children already in her care. Helen Mar Meek had been just two years old when her father, Joe Meek, brought her to the mission in 1840; Jim Bridger’s daughter, Mary Ann, was six when she arrived in 1841; and the young boy Narcissa had named David Malin (after a neighbor and minister in Prattsburg) was about three in early 1842 when his Indian grandmother asked the Whitmans to take him in. Narcissa’s letters indicate that she never felt the same emotional connection with her brown-skinned wards as with their white counterparts.
Life for all the children at the Whitman Mission was regimented and austere. In addition to “family worship” every morning and evening, there were prayer meetings on Wednesdays, children’s prayer meetings on Thursdays, Bible class on Saturdays, and “Sabbath school” and church on Sundays. Every day the children were given verses of scripture to memorize. Because cleanliness was next to godliness, daily baths in the river were mandatory throughout most of the year and at least weekly in a tub in the house during the winter. “We had certain things to do at a certain hour,” Matilda recalled, describing her foster parents as “very particular in our being very regular in all our habits of eating and sleeping.” The girls did household chores; the boys helped with the livestock. They all had garden plots to tend to.11
The Whitmans did not celebrate Christmas, which they considered a pagan holiday. Narcissa disapproved of giving children sweets. The girls adapted fairly easily, the boys less so. Francis Sager ran away to The Dalles after less than a year. Marcus coaxed him back by promising to help him and his brother acquire cattle and horses that they could raise and eventually use as a stake to establish their own homesteads.
The addition of the Sagers brought to twenty-six the number of school-age children at the mission in the fall of 1844. To educate them, the Whitmans hired Alanson Hinman, a newly arrived emigrant from upstate New York. Narcissa described him as “a good and faithful disciplinarian.”12 Catherine Sager remembered Hinman as “a small-souled tyrant of a man [who] took delight in torturing helpless children.”13 He was the first in a series of teachers hired each year to take charge of the mission school, which by then was open only to white and a few métis students (including the offspring of Hudson’s Bay Company employees). Marcus had decided that Indian children could be properly educated only in residential schools, away from their parents, to minimize if not eliminate the influence of traditional cultures. He planned to open such a school “as soon as the relations of the country” were “stable.”14 He was not able to realize this vision, but in 1879 a Civil War veteran named Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school’s motto—“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”—reflected principles that Whitman had embraced thirty-five years earlier: that the only way to “save” Indians was to strip away all traces of their native language, religion, identity, and way of life and force them to assimilate into white culture.
Over time, the mission at Waiilatpu became increasingly mercantile in nature. “Situated as we are, necessity compells us to become supplyers [sic] to Immigrants and we may as well make the best of it we can,” Whitman wrote to David Greene at the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.15 He came to rely on emigrants as a source of both income and labor. He sold them wheat, corn, potatoes, and other provisions. If they could not pay in cash, Whitman accepted cattle or oxen in trade. He then sold the livestock to Indians. Some emigrants complained about his prices (a dollar a bushel for grain, 40 cents a bushel for potatoes), but Whitman said he was only trying to cover his expenses. He extended credit to those who had nothing to offer in trade, although he expected repayment once the emigrants had established themselves in the Willamette Valley. He took steps to collect by placing a legal notice in one of the first issues of the Oregon Spectator, published in Oregon City, warning “all persons indebted to Dr. M. Whitman” to settle their debts within three months or face legal action.16
An improved wagon road, developed in 1844, skirted the Whitman Mission by about thirty miles to the south. Whitman worried that the decrease in direct traffic would leave him with produce and grain he could not sell and bills he could not pay. To compensate, he began hauling supplies to the Umatilla River, where he could intercept wagon trains on the new route. The sales there disappointed him, but he also used the trips to recruit carpenters, blacksmiths, millwrights, and others with special skills to come and work for him at Waiilatpu. Whitman had ambitious plans. He wanted to create a center of white settlement that would rival Oregon City, with farms, churches, schools, even a college. “He wanted to see the country settled,” wrote Henry K. W. Perkins, a Methodist missionary at The Dalles, who knew Whitman well. “The beautiful valley of the Walla Walla he wanted to see teeming with a busy, bustling white population. Where were scattered a few Indian huts, he wanted to see thrifty farm houses.” Instead of vast herds of Indian horses on the rich grassland of Cayuse country, he “wanted to see grazing the cow, the ox, and the sheep of a happy Yankee community.”17
When the New York–based Methodist Mission Board (an arm of the Methodist Missionary Society) offered to sell its property at The Dalles in 1847, Whitman urged his board to buy it. He had been interested in the station for years, primarily because of its strategic location on the Columbia. The board finally agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and Whitman went to Oregon City in August to complete the transaction. A down payment of $69.75 on a total purchase price of $721 gave him control of the property. “This I think now is to be our best station,” he wrote to David Greene. “It will be here we must have two Schools. One for the children of the Mission. And a boarding school for the natives.”18 Whitman installed his nephew Perrin, then age seventeen, and Alanson Hinman, the former schoolteacher at the Whitman Mission, as caretakers of the property.
Greene, unhappy about Whitman’s growing interest in commerce, often chastised him for paying too much attention to “temporal” affairs—for becoming more businessman than missionary. Whitman, sensitive to the criticism, wondered “where the line of duty lies” between “diligence in business” and “fervency in spirit in the service of the Lord.” Was it not his duty to “lay the foundation for the speedy settlement of the country”? To “found & sustain institutions [of] learning & religion”?19 Besides, the American Board had repeatedly pressured its missionaries in Oregon to become self-sufficient; if Whitman didn’t make money by selling supplies to emigrants, he would have to “draw upon the Board” to pay his bills.20 Whitman also insisted he was making progress with the Indians. “A vast change has already been wrought among them,” he declared to Greene. “There are but few who have not cattle, a number have sheep and nearly all have plantations, more or less.”21 It was a dubious claim. Perhaps a third of the Indian families living near Waiilatpu tended crops, but only intermittently, in ways that didn’t interfere with seasonal food-gathering cycles. Those Indian families who cultivated land maintained only small plots of a quarter acre to three acres—hardly enough for conversion to an agrarian lifestyle.
There was even less evidence of the missionaries’ impact on Cayuse spirituality. Whitman still conducted services for Indians every Sunday, but he conceded that attendance had declined. He blamed inroads by “Papists.” A number of influential Cayuses had converted to Catholicism, and one, the headman Tauitau, had donated land and a building for use as a Catholic mission near his village on the Umatilla River. In one early attempt to quantify the results of his evangelistic efforts, Whitman counted “two to four hundred” attending Sunday services and “twenty to fifty” at weekday meetings.22 In later years, tellingly, his references to spiritual activities involving Indians were usually brief and vague, with no headcounts. Greene continued to caution Whitman about his priorities. “I fear you do not labor as much for the salvation of the Indians as Christ claims of you,” he wrote on October 22, 1847—about five weeks before the attack that put an end to the Whitman Mission.23
Cayuse attitudes toward the Whitmans during the last few years of the mission, at least as revealed in the Whitmans’ letters, alternated between overt hostility and grudging tolerance. Historian Julie Roy Jeffrey attributes the pattern to “factional struggles and shifts in power and influence” among various Cayuse leaders.24 Some saw value in the presence of the missionaries; others saw malevolence; and some vacillated, moving first to one side and then the other. When the prevailing sentiment seemed supportive or at least neutral, Whitman hoped the change was permanent. When tension flared again, he talked about leaving but took no concrete steps to do so.
Whitman continued to be dogged by Indian doubts about his status as a medicine man, or te-wat. In 1844 he was accused of causing two deaths. One was a young man who died of what Whitman diagnosed as “apoplexy.” The other, more problematic for Whitman, was Waptashtakmahl (Feathercap), one of the headmen who had welcomed Rev. Samuel Parker to Cayuse country years earlier. Parker had claimed that Whitman was “a sorcerer of great power.” As discussed in Chapter 6, Plateau Indians credited te-wats with spiritual powers that could be used to cure or, at times, to kill. Healers whose patients died could be suspected of misusing or failing to control their powers and be put to death themselves. After his father died, Waptashtakmahl’s son angrily accused Whitman of causing the death and threatened to kill him in retaliation. Both Marcus and Narcissa were troubled enough by the encounter to wonder whether it had become too dangerous for them to stay at Waiilatpu.25
A series of confrontations about other issues in 1845 gave Whitman even more reason to consider relocating to the Willamette Valley. He twice came close to blows with Tomahas, a subchief in the band headed by Tiloukaikt. Whitman wanted the Indians to pay him for grinding corn and wheat at the mission’s gristmill (he expected payment of one horse in return for grinding enough grain to fill twenty sacks).26 Tomahas demanded that Indians have free access to the mill, since it was on their land. Catherine Sager remembered seeing Whitman stumble into the mission house after being threatened by Tomahas for a second time, “exhausted in body and vexed in spirit,” saying if the Indians wanted him to go, “he would gladly leave as he was tried almost beyond endurance.”27 But Tiloukaikt apparently smoothed things over, and Whitman carried on as usual.
A more serious issue flared up later that year when a delegation of Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Nez Perce headmen met with Whitman, Henry Spalding, and a few other whites at Waiilatpu to demand retribution for the murder of Elijah Hedding, the eighteen-year-old son of Walla Walla chief PeoPeoMoxMox. Hedding had been educated and trained as a preacher at the Methodist mission school and seemed destined to assume a place in leadership circles on the Plateau. But in 1844, while taking part in a joint Cayuse and Walla Walla expedition to trade horses and furs for cattle in California, he was fatally shot by an American during a quarrel at Sutter’s Fort. His enraged and grief-stricken father appealed to Elijah White, the putative “sub-Indian agent” in Oregon City, asking that White punish the perpetrator, in keeping with the “Laws” that he had convinced the Indians to adopt in 1843. White said he was sorry but could do nothing. Since Hedding had been “a leader in religious worship and learning,” as Whitman put it, some Indians proposed to avenge his loss by killing an American of equal status, and “Mr. Spalding or myself” were deemed suitable candidates.28 After lengthy discussion of this and other grievances, the headmen agreed to take no action against the missionaries but warned that they would no longer accept responsibility for whatever their young men might do.
Anger about the death of Elijah Hedding surfaced again six months later during a tense exchange between Whitman and Tauitau (also known as Young Chief). Tauitau and his half-brother, Five Crows, were headmen of the Cayuse band on the lower Umatilla, near today’s Pendleton. Tauitau had initially been friendly to the Whitmans and for a while maintained a winter lodge near Waiilatpu. He later converted to Catholicism. After he and his son accepted baptism by Father François N. Blanchet at Fort Walla Walla in 1838, Whitman took to calling Tauitau “the Papist,” and their relationship soured.
In late November 1845, Tauitau and a Nez Perce ally visited Whitman to unload a long list of festering complaints, beginning with the unavenged death of Elijah Hedding (one of Tauitau’s nephews) and the loss of horses and other property that the Indians had been forced to leave behind at Sutter’s Fort. Tauitau said he would never again send children to a mission school. He accused Whitman in particular and Americans in general of planning to seize the Indians’ land, even if they had to use poison and disease to get it. He also said he was always wary when offered food by white people for fear it had been poisoned. Whitman denied that he was trying to steal land or poison Indians, but Tauitau said he would hold Whitman responsible for such deeds, either directly or through “conniving.” Whitman was so frightened by this confrontation that his hand shook as he wrote about it in a letter to his colleagues, Elkanah Walker and Cushing Eells, at Tshimakain. He didn’t think that Tauitau himself would do him harm but worried “such language to me would remove all restraint from the reckless, and I would have no assurance but that I might be killed on the most slight or sudden occasion.”29
Whitman told Tauitau he would leave by the next spring if Cayuse headmen agreed he should go. He told Walker and Eells that he would keep the mission property in readiness for a quick departure if needed. But Tauitau returned to the Umatilla, a semblance of calm returned to Waiilatpu, and there was no more talk, for the moment, of abandoning the mission.
It’s hard to know why Whitman, in the face of so many warnings about the precariousness of his position, did not leave. Perhaps it was simply hubris that kept him at Waiilatpu, or reluctance to admit defeat, or the conviction that despite any threats from Indians he and his wife were under the protection of God. Perhaps the element of competition with the Catholics clouded his judgment. Both Marcus and Narcissa regarded their mission as a vital bulwark against the spread of “Papism” and were loath to see it “fall into the hands of Catholics.”30 Still, Whitman often confessed ambivalence about whether to stay or go. “I would like to be discharged could I feel as sure I was wright [sic] in leaving as I was in coming among the Indians,” he wrote to David Greene in the spring of 1847. He said he was thinking about filing a claim to land in the Willamette Valley, “to be ready in case of retirement.”31
More than four thousand people traveled overland to Oregon Country in 1847, the largest emigration yet. Whitman nearly ran short of food to sell them. Winter had come early and lingered long, cutting into his crop yields. At Whitman’s request, Henry Spalding brought seventeen packhorses loaded with wheat and corn to Waiilatpu to restock the storehouses. Whitman was worried that too many pitiable travelers with few resources would detour to the mission. “The first passers never give us any trouble,” he commented. “The weak teams and needy persons come last, as also generally the sick. But we cannot move ourselves out of the way and must meet the trial the best we can.”32 It was Narcissa who noticed that the influx also made the Cayuse anxious. “The Indians are amazed at the overwhelming numbers of Americans coming into the country,” she wrote to her parents in the summer of 1847. “They seem not to know what to make of it.”33
The arrival of the wagon trains that year coincided with a virulent epidemic of measles among the Indians. The source of the outbreak is not clear. Anthropologist Robert Boyd, among others, traces it to a Cayuse–Walla Walla expedition that had just returned from an extended trip to the Sacramento Valley. About thirty of the two hundred men, women, and children who went to California died of measles while on the journey home. It is possible that survivors carried the virus back with them, initiating a chain of transmission that continued for months.34 However, members of at least one and possibly three emigrant families were sick with measles when they arrived at the mission in September. Any one of them could have been the unwitting vector that brought a highly contagious disease to a population with no acquired immunities to fight it and already weakened by a hard winter.
Euro-Americans, after millennia of exposure, rarely died after contracting measles. In contrast, mortality rates among indigenous people were distressingly high. Traditional treatments, in which the sick sat in a sweathouse as long as possible and then plunged into an icy river, didn’t help. Measles is characterized by a raging fever and in severe cases can be followed by pneumonia, dysentery, or encephalitis. Patients with fever can become dehydrated in a sweathouse; a dive into cold water could send a body into shock. Marcus Whitman’s treatments were equally counterproductive—he relied on calomel, cayenne pepper, and bleeding—but his white patients tended to recover while his Indian patients did not. The epidemic took a terrible toll on Cayuse families. According to William McBean, chief trader at Fort Walla Walla, about thirty Indians in Tiloukaikt’s band on the Walla Walla River died within two months, mostly children, “one after another.”35 Measles also killed Cayuses in the two Umatilla River bands. A Cayuse messenger reportedly told a large gathering of Nez Perce at Lapwai in early December that a total of 197 Cayuses had died—a number that, if correct, means the tribe lost more than a third of its estimated five hundred members during the epidemic. Among the victims, it was said, was the wife of Tomahas, the subchief who had quarreled with Whitman about the gristmill.36
On November 22, when Henry Spalding brought his daughter Eliza to Waiilatpu to attend school for the winter, he found lodges filled with sick and dying Indians, “some in the midst of measles, others in the last stages of dysentery,” with “no suitable means to alleviate their inconceivable sufferings.” Disease was “sweeping them off—one, three, and five in a day.”37 At least a dozen children (including three of the Whitmans’ wards) and several young adults at the mission also had measles, but so far there had been only one death among them. Six-year-old Sylvia Jane Osborn, daughter of a carpenter working at the mission, died on November 24. Narcissa invited a Cayuse into the house to see the body, hoping the sight of a dead white child would ease the Indians’ “growing distrust” of the missionaries.38 It did not.
The epidemic revived old suspicions that Whitman was using poison to kill Indians in order to take their land and give it to white settlers, just as he had poisoned wolves to protect his sheep and cattle, and just as his onetime missionary colleague, William Henry Gray, had poisoned melons to keep Indians from eating them. Joe Lewis, an English-speaking métis of Delaware heritage who arrived at the Whitman Mission in the fall of 1847, took on the role of provocateur. Whitman had hired Lewis as a laborer but soon fired him, calling him a “worthless vagabond.”39 For weeks afterward, Lewis floated from one Cayuse lodge to another, fanning flames of hostility toward the missionaries. He claimed to have overheard the Whitmans and Spalding discussing plans to kill all the Cayuse, and Nez Perce too, by giving them poisoned medicine. If the Cayuse did not kill the missionaries soon, Lewis warned, they would all be dead before spring.40
Even so, many Cayuses resisted the call for violence. No headmen from the Umatilla River bands supported it. Camaspelo, leader of the band at the headwaters, later said he had been approached by a messenger from Tiloukaikt’s band who told him that an attack was being planned and asked for his support. “I pointed to my sick child, and told him my heart was there, and not on murder,” Camaspelo said.41 Tauitau, putting aside his earlier disagreements with Whitman, took a neutral position. Tiloukaikt himself apparently sanctioned the attack only because some of the young men in his band—possibly hoping to earn status as warriors—goaded him into it.
Marcus Whitman was an exhausted, harried man during those last few cold, damp days in November 1847. His mission had become, in effect, a settlement of Euro-Americans, and he was the overworked governor. More than seventy people were crammed into the complex. Some were sick and needed his medical care. Endless other responsibilities demanded his time: there were repairs to oversee, workers to instruct, provisions to be doled out, letters to write. He spent long hours on horseback, visiting Indian villages, trying to treat the sick, sometimes helping to bury the dead.
On November 27, a Saturday, a messenger asked Whitman to come to Tauitau’s village, about twenty-five miles southwest of Waiilatpu, because of illness there. Spalding accompanied him. The pair left at sundown—about 4:00 p.m. at that time of year—and rode all night, arriving at dawn. They stopped first at the lodge of Stickus, one of the missionaries’ earliest and most loyal allies. Spalding, injured in a fall from his horse, stayed there while Whitman went on to do what he could for the sick. Before returning to Stickus, Whitman called on Bishop Augustin M. A. Blanchet (brother of Father François N. Blanchet) and Father Jean B. A. Brouillet at their newly established Saint Anne’s Mission near Tauitau’s village. To Brouillet, Whitman appeared “much agitated.”42 Given Whitman’s deep antipathy toward Catholics, he might have been more distressed over the presence of the priests than by any other concerns. Declining an invitation to stay for dinner, Whitman returned to Stickus’s lodge. There, according to Spalding, Stickus bluntly told Whitman that some Cayuses were planning to kill him. Visibly shaken, Whitman left alone for the long ride back to Waiilatpu. Spalding probably owed his life to the injury that kept him with Stickus that night.
Whitman reached the mission around midnight. Catherine Sager said she heard him tell Narcissa what Stickus had said. Narcissa did not come down for breakfast the next morning. One of the girls took her a plate of food and saw her weeping. The tray was later found in Narcissa’s room, the food untouched. After frying a steak for his breakfast, Marcus assisted with the burial of yet another Indian child, one of three who would die of measles that day, Monday, November 29. He wondered why only the immediate relatives and no other Indians attended.
The first shots were fired shortly after the midday meal. Two Indians pushed their way into the kitchen, asking for medicine. When Whitman turned to get it, one man sliced into his head with a hatchet. The other shot seventeen-year-old John Sager, who was in the kitchen winding twine for brooms, and then cut his throat. Several survivors swore later that the two assailants were Tiloukaikt and Tomahas. Outside, about a dozen Indians dropped the blankets they had been using to hide weapons. By the end of the day, nine “Bostons” were dead: Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, five other men, and two teenage boys. Two more men were shot and killed the next day. A week later, two other men, both young and recovering from what might have been measles, died in a final bloody assault at the Whitman Mission.
Three American men at the mission when the attack began managed to escape. Peter D. Hall, a carpenter from Illinois, staggered into Fort Walla Walla shortly after dawn on November 30, “half naked and covered with blood.”43 William McBean, the Hudson’s Bay Company official then in charge of the fort, immediately dispatched a messenger, pleading for help from Fort Vancouver. McBean may well have hesitated about offering refuge to Hall. With only a handful of men to defend his post from an Indian attack, McBean did not want to seem overly friendly to Americans. But he claimed later that Hall was too afraid to stay at the fort and wanted to go on to the Willamette Valley. He said he gave Hall food, clothing, and other supplies and saw him safely on his way.44 Hall was never heard from again. In the crossfire of recriminations after the attack, some said McBean had callously turned him away out of cowardice.
Another escapee, Josiah Osborn, showed up at Fort Walla Walla on December 2, carrying his three-year-old son and begging for help in rescuing his wife and two other children. When the attack began, the family had hidden under some floorboards in what had once been the “Indian Hall.” They cowered there until late that first night, when it was clear that the Indians had left the mission complex unguarded. The family crawled out and started walking the twenty-five miles west to the fort. Osborn’s wife, Margaret, was weak from the effects of a recent stillbirth. When she collapsed along the route, Osborn left her hidden in some willows on the edge of the river with their seven-year-old daughter and two-year-old son. Although apparently still wary of antagonizing the Cayuse, McBean provided a guide to help Osborn find the rest of his family and then let the reunited family stay at Fort Walla Walla. The third escapee, William Canfield, reached safety at Lapwai on his own.
Father Brouillet was baptizing the sick in Tiloukaikt’s main village at Pašx̣á (“Place of Balsamroot Sunflower,” about three miles east of Waiilatpu) when he heard about the attack, on November 30. He and an interpreter arrived at the Whitman Mission early the next morning, the first outsiders on the scene. They found ten bodies, scattered here and there, and Indians in control of the mission. Some of the emigrant women were sewing shrouds to encase the bodies for burial, since there were no carpenters who could build coffins. Joseph Stanfield, a French Canadian and one of Whitman’s hired hands (spared because he was not a “Boston”), was digging a mass grave. Brouillet helped bury the dead, offered what comfort he could to the survivors, and returned to the Umatilla. Like McBean, he took pains to maintain an air of neutrality. Brouillet worried that if he showed “too marked an interest” in helping the Americans, “it would only have endangered their lives and mine.”45
Two of the Whitmans’ wards—Hannah Louise Sager and Helen Mar Meek—died of measles shortly after the attack. The Indians held forty-five other people, mostly women and children, as hostages for a month. The women sewed shirts, knitted socks, and cooked for their captors (who made them taste the food first, to show that it hadn’t been poisoned). Archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1940s found evidence of an “orgy of feasting by the Indians,” including floors littered with animal bones in the Mission House.46 Among the captives were the two families that had been living at the sawmill in the Blue Mountains. Indians brought them to the mission and put the men to work at the gristmill. Their lives may have been spared because they claimed to be Englishmen, not “Bostons”—although it’s also possible that by that point, the Indians just wanted their labor.
Three prominent Cayuse men each took a young white woman as a “bride,” a fact that would inflame the citizens of Oregon City when it became known. In some ways, however, the arrangements offered the women a degree of protection. Lorinda Bewley, twenty-one, claimed by Five Crows, acknowledged that he had shielded her from “a general abuse by the Indians.”47 She said that about a week after the initial attack, while Tiloukaikt was away, a warrior named Tamsucky dragged her into the mission yard and raped her. When Tiloukaikt returned, two days later, he sent her to the lodge of Five Crows on the Umatilla, some twenty-five miles away. She said she begged Tiloukaikt to let her stay with the other women, but he told her she would be safer with Five Crows. She did not sugarcoat what happened after that. She was allowed to spend her days with Father Brouillet and the other priests at the nearby Saint Anne’s Mission, but most nights Five Crows “compelled me to go to his lodge and be subject to him during the night.”48 Still, she thought “he was disposed to pity me, and not to abuse me.”49
After Lorinda Bewley was taken away, Tiloukaikt held a council in the hostages’ quarters at Waiilatpu. Speaking through two layers of translation (from Nez Perce to French and then to English), he said the young women would be better off as wives of chiefs who could protect them, rather than be “dragged around by worthless fellows, who would beat and abuse them.”50 According to Catherine Sager, the decision was left to the women. Two of them eventually agreed to accept Indian “husbands.” Sixteen-year-old Susan Kimball went off with a brother of Tomahas, known to whites as Frank Eskaloom (or Escaloom), identified later by some of the survivors as the man who shot Narcissa Whitman. Tiloukaikt’s eldest son—one of the first students in the school the Whitmans established in the early, ambitious years of their mission, and given the name “Edward” in honor of Narcissa’s favorite brother—claimed Mary Smith, age fifteen.51 Mary’s father, one of the men from the sawmill, reportedly urged her to yield, saying it would protect both of them.52 Father Brouillet and his fellow priests “entreated” the Indians to give up their white wives, but they were still fearful for their own safety and felt powerless to intervene.53
The principal men from all three Cayuse bands gathered at Saint Anne’s for a council hosted by Bishop Blanchet and Father Brouillet on December 20. Each headman spoke in turn. Tiloukaikt was the most voluble. In a two-hour speech he talked about the history of the Cayuse people from the time of first contact with whites, the death of Elijah Hedding, the unkept promises of the missionaries, the unwanted intrusions by the emigrants, and the grief of those whose families had been shredded by disease. He finished by saying he hoped the Americans would forget “what had been recently done, that now they [the Cayuse and the Americans] were even.”54 Blanchet forwarded their translated statements to George Abernethy, newly appointed provisional governor at Oregon City. The headmen asked that the Americans not go to war; that they “forget the lately committed murders as the Cayuses will forget the murder of the son of the great chief of Walla Walla”; and that the Americans “not travel any more through their country, as their young men might do them harm.”55
The headmen promised to free the hostages as soon as terms could be arranged. The delicate job of negotiating the release fell to Peter Skene Ogden, a seasoned explorer, trader, and diplomat, and, since 1846, one of two joint administrators of Fort Vancouver. Although the United States now claimed sovereignty over the region, the Hudson’s Bay Company was still the recognized authority in Oregon Country, with resources and experience that the provisional government in Oregon City lacked. Ogden had spent decades developing relationships with Plateau tribes. He spoke several native languages, including Nez Perce, and had been married for many years to a woman of Spokane and Flathead heritage. He was probably better equipped than anyone else to serve as a mediator between the Cayuse and the Americans.
Ogden was at Fort Vancouver when he received news of the attack. He left the next day, with sixteen men and three boatloads of trade goods. When he arrived at Fort Walla Walla, he convened a council with Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Walla Walla headmen and others, many of whom he knew. The Catholic priests also attended. Five Crows, notably, did not. Ogden began by scolding the Cayuse leaders for failing to control their young men and the young men for not listening to their elders. He offered blankets, shirts, guns, ammunition, tobacco, handkerchiefs, and knives in return for the safe delivery of all the captives within six days. He asked the Nez Perce delegates to bring the Spalding family (Henry and Eliza and their three youngest children) and any Americans with them at Lapwai to the fort, offering a ransom for them as well. Ogden thought it best for the Spaldings to leave the region given “the present excited, and irritable state of the Indian population.”56
Tiloukaikt said he would release the captives to Ogden because Ogden “was old, and his hair was white, and he had known him a long time.”57 The beleaguered headman faced opposition from those who feared that giving up the hostages would eliminate their strongest defense against reprisals. Neither Tiloukaikt’s son, Edward, nor Five Crows wanted to relinquish their white wives. But after a tense week of waiting, the Cayuse brought all their captives to Fort Walla Walla. The Spalding party arrived on January 1, 1848. The next day, Ogden loaded sixty-one men, women, and children (including the Osborn family of five) into Hudson’s Bay Company boats for the trip downriver to the security of the garrisoned settlement in Oregon City.58
David Malin, the métis boy the Whitmans had taken in five years earlier, remained at the fort. Abandoned by his parents and brought to the mission at age three, the mission family was the only one he had ever really known. “I am more and more pleased with my little boy every day,” Narcissa once wrote about him. “He is so mild and quiet, and so happy in his new situation that I have not had the least regret that I took him in.”59 Matilda Sager noticed David as the boat she was in pulled away from shore. “The last look I had of him,” she wrote, “was when we rowed away from Fort Walla Walla, leaving him standing on the bank of the river, crying as though his heart were breaking.”60