CHAPTER NINE:
CANONIZATION
I like the story of Whitman. If it isn’t true, it ought to be.
—President Warren G. Harding, July 3, 1923
More is imagined than known about what Marcus or Narcissa Whitman looked like. Neither was ever photographed or painted. That did not deter Chicago newspaperman Oliver W. Nixon from including black-and-white photographs of “Dr. Marcus Whitman at the time of his marriage” and “Mrs. Narcissa Prentice [sic] Whitman” in early editions of his 1895 book, How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon: A True Romance of Patriotic Heroism, Christian Devotion and Final Martyrdom. The “Whitman” in the photo is a clean-shaven man with mutton-chop sideburns, a high forehead, and a strong jaw. He wears a dark suit, a vest, and the clerical collar favored by Presbyterian and Congregational clergymen in the late nineteenth century. “Mrs. Whitman” has a longish face, hair parted in the middle and pulled back tight, thin lips, and a mouth as straight as the edge of a prayer book. She is clad in a Salvation Army–like uniform, with severe tailoring and a high neck.1
Purported photographs of “Dr. Marcus Whitman at the time of his marriage” and “Narcissa Prentice [sic] Whitman” were published in Oliver Nixon’s How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon (1895). Nixon later admitted that the man in the photo was a Chicago minister; he never identified the woman. There are no known photographs of either of the Whitmans.
Nixon, the author of several treacly tributes to Marcus Whitman, later conceded that the man in the photo was Rev. Marcus Whitman Montgomery, a Chicago preacher whose only relationship to the missionary was a partially shared name. Nixon never identified the woman. In subsequent editions the photo of the man was retouched to eliminate the ministerial collar. A new caption identified Montgomery as the subject while claiming that he “resembled Dr. Whitman very closely.” The photo of the woman was replaced by a portrait of someone much prettier, with a heart-shaped face, an upturned mouth, large, widely spaced eyes, and a softer hairstyle and dress. Nixon said the illustration was “drawn under the supervision of a gentleman familiar with [Narcissa’s] appearance” and was “considered a good likeness” of her.2
Entirely different purported images of the Whitmans surfaced in the 1970s (reproduced in Chapter 3). They were based on two small, rough pencil sketches by Canadian artist Paul Kane, who visited the Whitman Mission in July 1847, midway through a two-year odyssey to document Indian life in the Pacific Northwest. One drawing is a profile of a man with a long, pointed nose, a prominent chin, and the suggestion of a vandyke beard. He wears what appears to be a buckskin jacket, fringed at the shoulder, and a bucket-type hat with a narrow, sloping brim. The other sketch depicts a woman sitting at a table outdoors, one arm bent at the elbow, hand on her cheek. Her hair is loosely coiled above her ears. The sleeves of her low-necked, billowy dress are pushed up to the elbows. Her expression is dreamy and serene.
Kane never identified the subjects or dated the sketches, but in 1968, Ross Woodbridge, a Whitman enthusiast from Pittsford, New York, decided they were Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, not some random white people Kane encountered either at the mission or elsewhere during his extensive travels.3 There is no evidence that Whitman ever possessed a buckskin jacket. Indeed, he associated the material with “heathen” culture. Matilda Sager, one of the Whitmans’ adopted children, swore that Narcissa was “severe both in dress and the way she dressed her hair,” always wore a sunbonnet outdoors, and “never had her bare neck exposed.”4 Nonetheless, Woodbridge convinced historian Clifford Drury that the people in the sketches were the “real” Whitmans. Drury, in turn, commissioned idealized, full-color paintings based on the drawings for his 1973 book, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon.
Whatever they really looked like, Narcissa became more beautiful and saintlier and Marcus more manly and heroic in published accounts as the years passed. In the 1920s, Honore Willsie Morrow, a novelist who specialized in historical fiction, created a template for many subsequent writers by envisioning a Narcissa who was “tall and beautiful, of noble proportions and bearing,” with long-lashed blue eyes, “chiseled” features, and shining, golden hair.5 Drury called Narcissa “a woman of both physical and spiritual beauty.”6 To Arch Merrill, the “Poet Laureate of Upstate New York” in the 1950s, Narcissa was “a comely, vivacious girl with golden hair, a village belle.”7 Eliza Spalding was often cut out of the script, while Narcissa was cast as the “golden-haired, hymn-singing beauty” who was the “first woman to cross the continent.”8 If Eliza did appear in the story, it was usually as a foil—“as dark and scrawny as Narcissa was golden and buxom.”9
Marcus Whitman, meanwhile, was enveloped in a carapace of myth as the man who had “saved Oregon for the Flag.” That story—a claim that Whitman had rushed to the nation’s capital in the winter of 1842–43 to prevent the American government from trading the country to Great Britain for a worthless “cod fishery” off Newfoundland—emerged in the 1860s and gained traction in the 1880s.10 Whitman himself bragged that Oregon “might have slept forever” in the hands of the British or, possibly worse, “Jesuit Papists,” had he not “superintended” the first major wagon train to Oregon in 1843, an action that laid “the foundation for the speedy settlement of the country.”11 In fact, there was no likelihood at all, in the era of Manifest Destiny, that the United States would cede control of Oregon to the British or anyone else. Although Whitman was an ardent advocate of American colonialism, he rode east to save his mission, not Oregon. His goal, as shown earlier, was to persuade the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to rescind an order to shut down his operations at Waiilatpu. The wagon train Whitman joined on his return trip was organized and underway by the time he caught up with it.
Historians began debunking the Whitman-saved-Oregon myth in the early 1900s, but it lived on in newspaper and magazine articles, in historical fiction, and in speeches by politicians, including one delivered by President Warren G. Harding on July 3, 1923. Harding was midway through a two-month railroad tour of the West when he visited the tiny town of Meacham, in northeastern Oregon, to help commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the Oregon Trail. Rumors had begun circulating about scandals within his administration. Harding would die of a heart attack in San Francisco just one month later. But the mood in Meacham was buoyant. More than twenty thousand people had gathered for an event organized by boosters in nearby communities to promote auto tourism along the newly designated Oregon Trail Highway. The attractions included a historical pageant, featuring “pioneers” in covered wagons; and an “Indian Village,” set up by members of the Confederated Tribes of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla.
At one point, Harding walked over to the village for a “powwow.” He was greeted by a man called Sumpkin, identified in press accounts as “chief of the Cayuses and spokesman for all of the Indians.” Sumpkin used his audience with the president to protest the federal government’s treatment of Indians in Oregon. Speaking through an interpreter, he said the government was not meeting its treaty obligations. The Indians had not been able to “adjust their troubles” with the resident Indian agent. A reporter deemed it “a long address.”12 Harding responded with platitudes about friendship and peace and the need for mutual understanding. “If we had only understood each other from the beginning,” he said. “If the Indian had known of the purposes of the nation and the nation had understood the Indian, we need never have had any warfare between the races.” He deflected Sumpkin’s complaints by telling him to take them up with the superintendent of Indian affairs in Washington. The New York Times described this as a charming encounter between “the old redskin warrior” and “the Great White Father.”13 The dismissive tone was typical of non-Indian reactions when Indians tried to claim federally guaranteed rights in the 1920s.
The organizers had expected Harding to speak about pioneers and patriotism in general terms. Instead, the president focused on Marcus Whitman, “the pioneer missionary hero of the vast, unsettled, unexplored Oregon country.” Harding repeated as fact the old and entirely fanciful claim that Whitman—“a man among men”—had met President John Tyler in the White House in 1843 and persuaded him not to “barter away” Oregon. “Never in the history of the world has there been a finer example of civilization following Christianity,” he added. He was apparently oblivious to the irony of canonizing Whitman before an audience that included people whose ongoing hardships in the midst of “Christian civilization” began with Whitman’s arrival in their homeland.14 Interviewed after his speech, Harding said he was “mindful” that the story he had just recited was “a subject of controversy,” but he liked it anyway. “Whether it is correct or not it is an inspiration and should be handed down from generation to generation,” he said.15
Stories about the Whitmans as heroic, almost saintly agents of civilization were widely disseminated among non-Indians and rarely challenged for more than a century after their deaths, a fact that reveals more about contemporary social and political conditions than it does about the missionaries themselves and the lives they actually led. In the 1890s, a period of rapid industrialization and unsettling social change, the Whitmans represented an idealized past, marked by Protestant virtue and pioneer spunk. When the Great Depression made greed unfashionable in the 1930s, white Americans honored the missionaries as selfless individuals who went west to harvest Indian souls, unlike the fur traders, miners, and others who sought only profits and power. During the Cold War tensions of the 1950s, the Whitmans were emblems of Christendom, standing against the advance of godless Communism. Not until the 1970s did the Whitman legend begin to crumble, as new perspectives on the history of the West began to emerge and long-ignored voices began to be heard.
There was a sense, in the 1890s, that America’s best days might be behind it. The “frontier era”—US expansion into new areas of North America—had come to an end. Venerated early settlers were dying off. The country was in the grip of a major depression. Agricultural communities like Walla Walla were particularly hard-hit. The selling price of wheat, the region’s primary crop, fell from $1.11 a bushel in 1877 to 47 cents in 1895, while shipping costs (controlled by railroad monopolies) remained high. The supply of credit dried up, affecting farmers and the local businesses dependent on them. The industrial revolution was accelerating the pace of cultural change. As historian Peter Boag observed, the rocky transition from “the traditions of the nineteenth century to the uncertainties of the twentieth” created a cultural crisis. The idea that American life was more heroic and virtuous in the past fed a market for nostalgia. One result, especially in the region once known as Oregon Country, was a “fixation on, embellishment of, and memorialization” of the pioneer generation.16 In these circumstances the Whitmans, already portrayed in many forums as martyrs, were sure candidates for glorification.
In 1891 the Oregon State Legislature commissioned a history of “the heroic deeds of those brave men and noble women” who “saved this state to the United States.” That same year, the Oregon Pioneer Association began publishing installments of Narcissa Whitman’s travel diary and many of her surviving letters, bringing renewed attention to the missionaries. Oliver Nixon’s book, How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon, came out in 1895. The Ladies Home Journal took the story to a mainstream audience two years later with an article titled “When Dr. Whitman Added Three Stars to Our Flag.” (Oregon became a state in 1859, followed by Washington in 1889 and Idaho in 1890.17) Newspapers around the country picked up the tale about the daring cross-continental ride and the missionary who, with his self-sacrificing wife, had met a martyr’s death.
From left, Catherine Sager Pringle, Elizabeth Sager Helm, and Matilda Sager Delaney, photographed in Walla Walla in November 1897, during the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the attack. The last of the surviving “Sager orphans” (brought to the Whitman Mission as children in 1844), each of the women wrote memoirs about their years with the Whitmans, the attack, and its aftermath. Whitman College and Northwest Archives, Sager Family Collection, Box 2, Folder 82.
Whitman College president Stephen B. Penrose played a key role in elevating the school’s namesake to the status of national hero. When he began his forty-year tenure as president of Whitman, in 1894, the college was in financial crisis and its survival in doubt. It was skipping payments on a $12,000 mortgage, owed $3,000 to its underpaid faculty, its major donor had threatened to withdraw a $50,000 gift, and enrollment had dwindled to fewer than forty students. A member of a prominent Philadelphia family, Penrose realized that the story of a missionary who secured a western empire for the United States would resonate with the kind of philanthropists he had known in the East. He wrote a Whitman-saved-Oregon pamphlet titled “The Romance of a College,” printed hundreds of copies, prepared a speech based on its major points, and set off on a nationwide fund-raising tour. “The patriotic people of the United States have to say whether the only monument of a national hero shall be allowed to perish from the earth,” he declared.18 Penrose’s campaign was successful enough, according to a history of the college by G. Thomas Edwards, that although Marcus Whitman did not “save Oregon,” the Whitman myth ended up saving the school.19
As the fiftieth anniversary of the Cayuse attack approached, in early 1897, Penrose worked with a Portland-based group to revive a long-dormant campaign for a permanent memorial to the Whitmans on the grounds of the former mission. They planned to build a new vault and place a marble tombstone on the common grave where most of the victims had been buried; install a twenty-seven-foot-tall obelisk and pedestal on the hill overlooking the gravesite; and dedicate the new tomb and the “Whitman Shaft” with two days of commemoration, beginning on November 29, the anniversary day. The new tomb could not be constructed without temporarily disinterring the bones in the “Great Grave.” Catherine Sager Pringle and Elizabeth Sager Helm, then in their sixties and the oldest of the surviving Sager orphans, objected to plans to open the grave, which held the remains of their two brothers, but they were overruled. Penrose himself supervised the excavation.20
Only five skulls and a few bones were found. Two Walla Walla doctors who examined the remains identified one skull as Marcus Whitman’s because its size allegedly indicated “superior mental development.” A gold filling in one molar was consistent with knowledge that Whitman had a tooth filled in Saint Louis in 1843. Also, the doctors declared, “the seats of muscular adjustment show a strong, well developed man.” Just one skull was clearly female, they said, and thus belonged to Narcissa, the only woman killed in the attack. Moreover, they claimed, those two skulls (and none of the others) had been “cut in two” with a surgical saw—presumably belonging to Whitman—in an act of postmortem mutilation.21 One doctor speculated that Indians had hacked into the skulls in the belief that “when a great man or woman died, if the head was opened the spirit of the departed would enter the body of the operator,” in a sort of transmigration. The doctors gave their report to Penrose and to the Spokesman-Review (Spokane), which published it under the sensational headline “Skulls Cut In Two.”22
Catherine Sager Pringle was among the few who questioned the forensic abilities of the Walla Walla doctors. In a lengthy letter to the Spokesman-Review, she said she had seen wolves dig into the grave and drag away parts of the bodies, including the bodies of the Whitmans. “Where the bones of Dr. Whitman and many of his associates are, God only knows,” she wrote. She thought the skull with the gold filling was probably that of Lucian Saunders, the lawyer Whitman had recruited to teach school at the mission. As an educated man from the East, Saunders was as likely as Whitman to have such a filling. She also wondered whether “the learned doctors” could really identify a skull by gender. The skull they said was Narcissa’s might instead have belonged to one of Catherine’s teenage brothers.
She also challenged the assertion that Indians had sawed into the skulls. “As I saw the corpses before burial,” Catherine wrote, “I know there were no such wounds as described.” If the Indians had wanted to open the Whitmans’ heads to release spirits or some such, they would have used tomahawks or knives, not something as unfamiliar as a surgical saw. Besides, she concluded, “the Cayuses were superstitious about the dead and would never have picked up one of those skulls to saw it.”23 Perrin Whitman, Marcus’s nephew, agreed that the dead bodies had not been mutilated.24 Photos of the alleged Whitman skulls, filed away in the Whitman College archives, clearly show they were intact—not literally “cut in two.”25 But ghoulish stories about “severed skulls” appeared in newspapers around the country, reinforcing an image of the Whitmans as victims of ruthless barbarians.
The tombstone and the obelisk were still at a marble quarry in Vermont on the eve of the anniversary, but the commemoration proceeded as planned. Rev. Leavitt H. Hallock, a trustee of Whitman College, delivered the opening oration in the Walla Walla Opera House. The Walla Walla Union reprinted it—all 7,437 words—confident that it would “be read with delight by numerous readers throughout the United States, if not in every English speaking quarter of the World.” One wonders how many listeners had nodded off by the time Hallock reached his crescendo, in which he compared Whitman to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and asked why Paul Revere’s ride was so revered when it had lasted but a scant hour while Whitman had spent half a year traveling to Washington to save Oregon.26
A special excursion train took at least two thousand people from Walla Walla to the gravesite the next day, a drizzly Tuesday. Eight survivors of the attack, including the three remaining Sager sisters, attended. Afterward, “hundreds crowded around the aged survivors, eagerly listening to their graphic recitals of the thrilling and bloody events of ’47.”27 Later that day, President Penrose presided over a lengthy program in the Opera House. Dignitaries spoke, bands played, the Whitman College choir sang. Perrin Whitman, unable to attend, sent his grandson, who gave Penrose a lock of what he said was Narcissa’s hair. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer summed up the proceedings with this headline: “Whitman’s Grave No Longer Unkept / Vast Throngs Do Honor to His Memory / Entire Northwest Represented in Gathering of Pioneers at Waiilatpu, Where the Missionary Band Was Butchered Fifty Years Ago.”28
When the obelisk and grave marker finally arrived, at the end of January 1898, Penrose conducted a brief dedication ceremony for a handful of onlookers.29 Three of the thirteen names carved into the new marble tombstone were misspelled; one victim was remembered only by his last name, and another was not included on the list at all. The last name on the list, “Jacob D. Hall,” referred to Peter D. Hall, who escaped from Waiilatpu on the first day of the attack, probably was not killed by Indians, and definitely was not buried in the “Great Grave.” Today, all the names on the tombstone are weathered and barely legible.
The next large-scale effort to memorialize the Whitmans came in 1936, the centennial of their arrival in the Northwest. Planning began a full year earlier, when the Walla Walla Chamber of Commerce established a nonprofit corporation to commemorate the anniversary with a multipart extravaganza, including a historical pageant with a cast of thousands. The goal was to raise money to turn the former mission into a national monument administered by the National Park Service. The owners of a thirty-seven-acre farm adjacent to the eight-acre site of the “Great Grave” and the “Whitman Shaft” had offered to sell it for $10,000. Walla Walla’s business leaders believed a national monument, located just seven miles west of town, would attract tourists and boost the local economy. At the least, they expected the centennial celebration to bring in some money and serve as a distraction from the grim realities of the Great Depression. The theme would be “One Hundred Years of Progress.”
The festivities, spread out over four days, began on August 13, 1936. The Whitmans did not establish their mission until late December, but winter in the Walla Walla Valley was not a good time to throw a big party with main attractions that would be staged outdoors. The official program (cost: 25 cents) featured a photo of a perky cowgirl in a short skirt, black cowboy boots, and a white hat, pointing west toward an image, superimposed on the background, of a long wagon train snaking its way through hilly scrubland. The centennial drew an estimated ten thousand visitors to Walla Walla. Activities included daily parades, with marching bands, oxen-drawn wagons, floats featuring parasol-toting “pioneer mothers,” and hundreds of horses with costumed riders. The entire business district was transformed with false fronts into a pioneer town. Hotel, retail, and even office workers dressed in pioneer garb. Vendors sold souvenir posters, postcards, pins, and medallions.
Narcissa Whitman, hailed as the woman who “established the first home in what is now the state of Washington” and “gave birth to the region’s first baby,” was the star of an afternoon devoted to the “pioneer mothers.” (Nonwhite homes and babies did not figure into the narrative.30) Clifford Drury, who had just published the first of his many books about the Whitmans and the Spaldings, eulogized her. Members of the Spokane Monday Musical Club sang excerpts from an opera about her (Narcissa, music and libretto written in 1912). A full-length portrait of Narcissa as a beautiful blond, taken from its usual spot in a Whitman College women’s residence hall named in her honor, was displayed in an amphitheater before an admiring crowd.31
The pageant, a spectacle called Wagons West! (admission: $1, plus 5 cents tax), presented the Whitmans as “heroic Christian soldiers and martyrs in the cause of humanity.”32 Stephen Penrose, newly retired as Whitman College president, wrote the script, adapting one he had written for a 1923 pageant titled How the West Was Won. The vogue for historical pageantry—in which huge numbers of costumed amateurs reenacted events tied to some historic milestone—had developed in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, reached a peak in the eastern United States around World War I, and then found new relevance in the West. The pageants were invariably pioneer-centric, celebratory in nature, and designed to build a sense of community in young towns and cities. Walla Walla’s centennial version presented history as a triumphal march of progress, beginning with dinosaurs emerging from a swamp and culminating in a Whitman College graduation ceremony. In a brief scene depicting indigenous people, Indian men lazed around while the women worked. The unmistakable message was that the Indians’ traditional way of life was primitive and unproductive until the Whitmans arrived, bringing Bibles and civilization to the wilderness. The show ended with hundreds of people forming a “living flag” and singing the national anthem.33
More than three thousand local residents participated in the pageant as actors, singers, dancers, or musicians. Hundreds of others helped with costumes, sets, and other chores. The organizers tried to recruit cast members from the Confederated Tribes of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Reservation in Pendleton, but records do not show how many signed up. At least some “Indians” in Wagons West! were white men wearing feather headdresses. Three young couples represented the Whitmans at different stages of life. The role of Narcissa discovering the body of her drowned toddler went to nineteen-year-old Vi Forrest. She remembered, decades later, that people in the audience cried during that scene. The pageant brought “a lot of pride” to the community, she commented. “Marcus and Narcissa were valued highly.”34
The Whitman Centennial Corporation raised enough money to buy the land at the former mission site, but it took several years to clear legal hurdles and establish the Whitman National Monument. Archaeological work that began in 1941 was almost immediately suspended and did not resume until after World War II ended. An adobe storage shed, built by the Works Progress Administration to house archaeological finds and intended to last only a month or so, was turned into a rudimentary museum. It was not replaced until 1963. By then, the monument had doubled in area, to ninety-eight acres, and the name changed to the Whitman Mission National Historic Site. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the historic site’s interpretation of the Whitmans was consistently adulatory and nationalistic. “The work of the Whitmans at this mission places them with the noblest of the pioneers colonizing the West,” a 1958 Park Service brochure declared. “Their indomitable spirit, energy, and determination carried the American flag to remote regions and contributed to our national expansion.” The brochure’s cover featured a drawing of a slender, sunbonneted woman in a long dress, a Bible in the crook of one arm, standing next to a tall, broad-shouldered man in a wide-brimmed hat, both gazing westward. The Cayuse got barely a mention, except as perpetrators of the “massacre” (a word that was repeated five times in the eight-page brochure).35
Park Service planners wanted visitors to appreciate the Whitmans’ “devotion to God and country” and gain “inspiration and spiritual regeneration” from their example.36 It was the height of the Cold War. Americans were fighting multifaceted wars against “Godless communists.” Congress passed and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed laws adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and requiring that the phrase “In God We Trust” be imprinted on US currency. That the Bible-toting Whitmans had played a role in Christianizing and “colonizing the West” was a point of pride—not opprobrium.
The Whitmans were markedly unsuccessful as missionaries—in their eleven years in Oregon they failed to convert a single Indian—yet historian Clifford Drury confidently declared in 1973 that “no Protestant missionaries in the history of the United States have been honored by so many monuments and memorials as Marcus and Narcissa Whitman.”37 A large mural installed in the Oregon State Capitol Rotunda in 1938 depicted John McLoughlin welcoming the Whitmans and the Spaldings to Fort Vancouver. Fort Whitman stood guard over Puget Sound from Goat Island until it was decommissioned and turned over to the Washington State Game Department in 1947. Elementary schools in Richland and Spokane, a middle school in Seattle, and a high school in Rushville, New York (Marcus Whitman’s birthplace) were among the institutions that bore the missionary’s name. A Presbyterian nonprofit acquired Narcissa’s childhood home in Prattsburg, New York, restored it, and opened it to the public as a museum. Local historical societies and community boosters placed plaques, monuments, and roadside markers honoring the Whitmans in no fewer than ten states and the District of Columbia.
The Whitmans also made inroads into popular culture, through books, magazine articles, radio programs, and, briefly, a movie. A story by Oregon City writer Eva Emery Dye, a pioneer in the genre of historical fiction, inspired the script for a film to be titled Martyrs of Yesterday. Thirty members of the Confederated Tribes of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla signed on as extras. However, production was halted after an actress and a photographer died and five others were injured in a bus accident en route to a shoot near Oregon City. Instead of the intended feature film, the producers cut the movie to a ten-minute short, released in late 1919 under the title In the Land of the Setting Sun.38
In 1930, NBC-affiliated stations broadcast a half-hour radio drama called The Marcus Whitman Story. At least seven novels about the Whitmans saw print in the 1950s. A standard plot line drew on the old rumor that Henry Spalding had once proposed to Narcissa, been rejected, and was forever jealous of her and Marcus. Drury, who dismissed the “spurned suitor” story as nonsense in his 1936 biography of Spalding, changed his mind and gave it a patina of authority in later books. Despite remarkably flimsy evidence (as noted in Chapter 3), the idea of Narcissa at the center of an enduring love triangle took hold in historical fiction, passed to a new generation as fact, and became embedded in history textbooks. It remains commonplace in narratives about the Whitmans to this day.39
A few scholars began to debunk the Whitman legend in the early twentieth century, but it proved remarkably hard to dislodge. As Whitman College professor G. Thomas Edwards wrote in his history of the school, “Americans wanted to believe in heroism and patriotism, and they generally dismissed the scholarship that demolished popular myths.”40 Historical myths about George Washington and the cherry tree, Paul Revere and his midnight ride, and Custer’s last stand persisted long after they first faced challenges from inconvenient facts. Stephen Penrose, a key promoter of the mythical Marcus Whitman, never changed his story, despite encountering increasing skepticism as time went on. He even added some dramatic and entirely false details (for example, that the Whitmans had been scalped).41 Penrose repeated the story so many times he became “captured” by it, Edwards wrote, and he clung to it until his death in 1954.42
The mythical Marcus Whitman had such broad appeal in the post–World War II era that the Washington State chapter of the Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs initiated a campaign in 1947 to have him join the pantheon of heroes in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC. A federal law dating from the end of the Civil War allowed each state to honor two “deceased persons who have been citizens thereof” with statues, either marble or bronze, to be placed in a large, semicircular room near the Capitol Rotunda.43 When the original hall became overcrowded, the display area was expanded into adjacent corridors. By the late 1940s nearly all the states had at least one statue somewhere in the Capitol and most had two. Washington had none. The businesswomen initially proposed to pay tribute to both Whitmans with a joint statue. After learning that Congress permitted only statues of individuals, they settled on Marcus and began lobbying the state legislature for the necessary authorization and funding. Senate Bill 32, introduced in the 1948–49 legislative session, endorsed the selection of Whitman and would have appropriated $15,000 to finance the project. “No other hero in the history of the state is more deserving of the honor of representation in Statuary Hall,” a Tacoma legislator declared.44
A few voices were raised in dissent. A group calling itself the “Good Government League” mailed postcards to each of the state’s 145 legislators claiming that “the Marcus Whitman legend is 90 percent fictitious”; that “hundreds” of other Washington citizens were more entitled to the honor; and the state would become “the laughing stock of the nation” if it put Whitman’s statue in the US Capitol.45 The bill’s sponsors reacted by withdrawing the provision for funding. The amended bill passed by an almost unanimous vote and became law in March 1949. It proclaimed Whitman “a deceased resident of national renown,” worthy of a statue commemorating his “fame and historic services as a great Washingtonian and a great American.” (Never mind that Whitman was not, strictly speaking, a “Washingtonian”—the state was not created until 1889, forty-two years after his death.) The task of selecting a sculptor, approving a design, and raising the estimated $30,000 to pay for it was left in the hands of a twelve-person committee. Sculptor Avard Fairbanks, dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah, won the commission.46
Whitman already had been honored by one statue, a terra-cotta figure created in 1896 by Pennsylvania sculptor Alexander S. Calder for the façade of the United Presbyterian Church’s headquarters in Philadelphia. Calder, father of famed mobilist Alexander Calder, presented Whitman as a stocky, middle-aged man, bundled in a fur-trimmed coat and hat, a muffler around his neck. The figure stands stoically by a wagon wheel, feet flat on the ground, empty handed, arms hanging at his sides. In contrast, Avard Fairbanks sculpted a man of action. His Whitman appears to be in motion, climbing an unbroken trail, buckskins taut against a muscled torso and thighs. The stoic missionary of the 1890s had been reimagined as a dashing frontiersman in the 1950s.
Washington added its second statue in Statuary Hall in 1980: Mother Joseph, a Canadian-born nun who designed and built schools and hospitals in Washington Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. Whitman, whose suspicion and distrust of “Papists” ran deep, would have been confounded to find himself sharing company in a hall of honor with a Catholic. Later, some people would wonder why notably secular Washington State should be represented in the nation’s capitol by two nineteenth-century religious figures.
Whitman’s statue was unveiled May 22, 1953, during ceremonies conducted in the Capitol Rotunda. Most of the state’s congressional delegation attended, along with dozens of dignitaries, from then Vice President Richard M. Nixon to keynote speaker Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Whitman College graduate. In remarks more eloquent and nuanced than the usual Whitman tributes, Douglas said the claim that Whitman had kept Oregon out of the hands of the British was “probably too extravagant.” He mentioned the impact of the measles epidemic on the Cayuse, saying, “By their reckoning the tribe would soon be decimated. And so they decided Whitman should die.” Douglas also outlined, at length, what he thought were Whitman’s main contributions: proving that the Pacific Northwest was within the reach of anyone who could ride a horse or sit on a wagon; promoting “the manifest destiny of the Nation”; setting into motion “forces that increased the spiritual as well as the material inheritance of America”; and serving as a model of selfless public service. He ended his remarks by predicting that for years to come “Americans young and old who pass through this Hall will remember the example of the Whitmans, and, remembering, will find the confidence to face their own frontier.”47
Two bronze copies of the statue were cast later. One was placed in the foyer of the Washington State Capitol in Olympia. The other found a home on the outskirts of the Whitman College campus in Walla Walla. Either late at night or early on a morning in October 2017, someone vandalized Walla Walla’s statue by splashing it with red paint. It was a reminder that the past is a moving target, filtered through perspectives and values that change over time. Heroes and martyrs stand on shaky pedestals, even when, as in the case of Marcus Whitman, the pedestal is a seven-ton block of granite.