CHAPTER TEN:
REINTERPRETING THE WHITMAN “TRAGEDY”
The attack was the result of religious zeal and the greed for land. Columbia River people had always welcomed new technologies from any culture they contacted—French, British, Spanish and Hawaiian. None of those groups ever took the land.
—Stephanie Martin, park ranger, Whitman Mission National Historic Site
Our ancestors called this land home. We are still here. We will continue to be here.
—Confederated Tribes of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla
For ninety years a life-size painting of an idealized Narcissa Prentiss Whitman hung in the Great Room of Prentiss Hall, a women’s residence and dining hall at Whitman College. The painting depicted Narcissa as a lovely young woman with large blue eyes, rosy cheeks, a cupid’s-bow mouth, and blond hair piled in thick, loose coils around the top of her head. The Narcissa Prentiss chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned the work and donated it to the college in 1927.1 Very late one night in October 2017, someone took a can of black spray paint into Prentiss Hall, aimed the nozzle directly at the painting, and squeezed, obliterating the heart-shaped face and sending rivulets of black down the V-necked pastel bodice and full hoop skirt. That same night, or possibly predawn morning, someone (perhaps the same “person or persons unknown”) sprayed red paint on the hands, torso, and pedestal of the Marcus Whitman statue at the edge of campus.
This romanticized portrait of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was defaced with spray paint in October 2017. The painting (reproduced here in black and white) had been displayed in Prentiss Hall at Whitman College for ninety years. It was restored but then tucked away in storage, a symbol of changing attitudes toward the Whitmans and their legacy in the Northwest. Photo courtesy The Cultured Pearl, Portland, and Whitman College, Walla Walla.
The vandalism was meant to be discovered on Monday, October 9, a day recognized by some as Columbus Day and by others as Indigenous Peoples Day. The color choices seemed deliberate: black in reference to white people using blackface as a tool of racial derision; red to suggest that Whitman had blood on his hands. An anonymous note, posted with the painting, denounced the Whitmans as “colonizers, racists, murderers” who “brought disease, stole native peoples’ land, claimed it for themselves, and actively recruited others to do the same.”2 A sympathetic faculty member described the clandestine deeds as “acts of resistance against landscapes of white supremacy.”3 The paint was scrubbed off the statue. The painting was cleaned and restored and then hung upside down in a special exhibit at the college’s Maxey Museum. The exhibit explored the ways in which the college—founded as a “living monument” to Whitman in 1859—had promoted and benefited from the image of the Whitmans as heroic Christian martyrs. When the exhibit closed, in December 2018, the painting was packed away and put in storage, a reflection of changing attitudes toward the sanctity of the pioneer past and the Whitmans’ place in it.
The challenges to Whitman iconography in Walla Walla came during a contentious national debate about who and what should be remembered in America. In 2015 a white supremacist’s massacre of nine black congregants at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a campaign to banish from the public square monuments, plaques, and place-names that paid homage to the Confederacy. The campaign quickly expanded to include memorials related, in one way or another, to the conquest of indigenous peoples. Just two weeks after the spray cans were aimed at the Whitmans, a group calling itself the Monument Removal Brigade poured red paint on the marble pedestal of a bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The statue, installed in 1940, features a powerful Roosevelt on horseback, flanked at stirrup level by two half-nude figures—one African, the other American Indian—both on foot and carrying his rifles, like porters. A New York Times art critic described it as “quite literally an emblem of white-man-on-top.”4
The Roosevelt statue had been the target of periodic protests for decades, as had an equally blunt tribute to racial hierarchy in downtown San Francisco called Early Days. Dedicated in 1894 as part of a massive monument to colonialism, Early Days featured a nearly naked Indian cowering at the feet of a Catholic missionary and a Spanish cowboy. The American Indian Movement Confederation condemned it in 1995 as a symbol of the “humiliation, degradation, genocide, and sorrow inflicted upon this country’s indigenous people by a foreign invader through religious persecution and ethnic prejudice.” The city added a small plaque about “mistreatment” of Indians but otherwise shrugged off the opposition as a niche issue, important only to an insignificant minority. The violence in Charleston two decades later, followed by the 2017 death of a counterprotester during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to new demands that the sculpture be removed. This time San Francisco responded by quietly carting it off to storage.5
To Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the end of Early Days marked “a tipping point for the politics of Native American memory.” As a nation, he said, “we still live with symbols of white supremacy in our public spaces and popular culture. But we are also at a stage where we can have an honest discussion about their origins and meaning and address the harm they do.”6
Scholars use the phrase “politics of memory” to describe how narratives about the past and the objects chosen to represent those narratives reflect and reinforce the politics of the present. Most of the Confederate statues in the South were erected during the Jim Crow era, especially from the 1890s through the 1920s. More appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, in response to efforts to desegregate American military forces, public schools, and public accommodations. These statues and monuments romanticized the Confederacy as a noble and heroic “Lost Cause” and downplayed the role of slavery in the Civil War. They also served as subtle tools of intimidation, aimed at black people trying to assert their civil rights. The same period saw the proliferation of monuments idealizing the virtues and sacrifices of white colonizers in the American West while ignoring the impact of conquest, both physical and cultural, on indigenous peoples. Glorifying the pioneers was a way to justify what had been done in the past and perhaps ease anxieties about the future—the solidity of stone and metal suggesting that the sons and daughters of the pioneers would continue to prevail.
A competing narrative began to resonate with many Americans in the late 1960s. Books such as Dee Brown’s best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and popular films such as Soldier Blue and Little Big Man (all released in 1970) helped reframe the story by presenting Indians in a sympathetic if sometimes one-dimensional light. Many of these works tended to portray Indians as passive victims of white mendacity. “It’s as if it didn’t matter what Indians did, only what whites did to them,” influential historian Richard White once said. But they helped generate interest, from a new generation of historians as well as from the general public, in western history that included nonwhite, nondominant points of view. White acknowledged that as a young scholar, he had found inspiration in Bury My Heart, despite its flaws.7
Perhaps more than any other period in American history, the late 1960s and 1970s were marked by broad challenges to the conventions of the past. Opposition to the Vietnam War gave rise to new critiques of nineteenth-century US military campaigns against Indians. The gains and tactics of the civil rights movement stimulated demands for justice from other previously marginalized groups, including Hispanics, farmworkers, women, and—most relevant to this book—American Indians. The American Indian Movement, founded in Minneapolis in 1968, launched a “Red Power” campaign with several attention-getting protests, including sit-ins at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 and the 1973 occupation of the site of the Wounded Knee massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Whether these political developments spurred or mirrored social change is hard to say, but guides at the Whitman Mission National Historic Site began noticing “a certain cynicism among some of our visitors—a feeling that the Whitmans were meddling where they didn’t belong and deserved their fate.”8
The US Congress responded to pressure from Indian activists by passing the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. The legislation made it the official policy of the United States to “protect and preserve” traditional spiritual and cultural practices. It was a repudiation of the very objectives that had drawn the Whitmans and their fellow missionaries to the West in the first place. The new law prompted a shift in the interpretive tone at the Whitman Mission National Historic Site. Marjorie Waheneka, a descendant of Cayuse, Palouse, Nez Perce, and Warm Springs Indians, joined the staff as a ranger and interpreter in 1980, the first member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla to work full-time at the mission. Some of her relatives warned her about taking the job. “At first people said, ‘How can you work there? Don’t you remember what happened to your people?’ ” Waheneka recalled in a 1993 interview. “But people don’t get mad anymore. Now they say, ‘It’s about time.’ ”9
The National Park Service, which operates the Whitman Mission site, redesigned the exhibits and expanded the programming in the mid-1980s to put more emphasis on Cayuse history. “Clash of cultures” replaced “heroic pioneers” as the governing motif. “We’re trying to get across the idea that the Cayuse culture was here and the Anglos just slammed into them,” one ranger said. The staff stopped conducting annual memorial services at the “Great Grave” on the Saturday closest to the date of the attack, a practice that had been carried on for more than half a century. Interest had dwindled, the ranger said, and besides, the ceremony seemed “inappropriate.”10 New displays reflected Indian and non-Indian perspectives in almost equal measure. One exhibit focused on the “seasonal round” and life for the Cayuse and their relatives before contact with whites. A sample caption read: “There were no fences then and no one owned the land.” Another exhibit attempted to put the Whitmans into historical context, noting the twin influences of Manifest Destiny and religious revivalism. “You can’t have thirteen people killed and not have an emotional issue,” Park Superintendent Terry Darby remarked, “and you can’t live this close to an Indian community and not be sensitive to their view. We want to show both points of view and not alienate one. So if it sounds like I’m waltzing through a minefield, I am.”11
In 1991, when Washington State Senate Majority Leader Jeanette Hayner, a Republican from Walla Walla, announced plans to install a Whitman statue (a replica of the one in the US Capitol) in her hometown, the reaction was at best lukewarm. The Salt Lake City artist who created the original sculpture had died. The mold was still in his studio and his heirs wanted to be rid of it. They offered Washington State officials the chance to use it one more time before they destroyed it. Hayner, one of the legislature’s most powerful members, declared the lawmakers “would be derelict in our duty” if they did not authorize a copy of the statue for “the place where it has the most significance.”12 Critics said it would be more fitting to put up a monument to Walla Walla chief PeoPeoMoxMox, who was murdered and mutilated by Oregon militiamen while trying to negotiate an end to the Walla Walla War in 1855. But Hayner pushed an appropriation of $53,000 through the legislature and the mold yielded a third and final casting. The resulting statue found a home at a five-way stop facing Walla Walla’s Main Street after suggestions for a more central location were rejected.13 PeoPeoMoxMox eventually got his own statue, commissioned by a local community group and installed in a plaza across from City Hall in June 2005. In the end, the prime real estate went to the Indian, not the missionary.
Six decades after Marcus Whitman was ensconced in the National Statuary Hall, there were calls for his eviction. A Seattle Times columnist wondered in 2014 whether a man who died more than forty years before Washington was even a state is “the best we’ve got.”14 In January 2019 a Seattle legislator introduced a bill to replace the statue (and its copy in Olympia) with a more contemporary hero, to be chosen by a ten-member task force. In the stilted language of the bill: “The legislature finds that under rigorous, objective review Marcus Whitman does not meet the standards of being one of our state’s top honorees with a statue display in Olympia and the statuary hall in the United States capitol.”15 Compare that to the accolades heaped upon Whitman when the original statue was dedicated in 1953, including this one from Governor Arthur Langlie: “America honors itself by honoring him.”16
University of Washington history professor John Findlay was among those who suggested that a suitable replacement would be a statue of Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually Indian fishing activist who died in 2014 at age eighty-three, after a lifetime of defending the treaty fishing rights of Northwest tribes and working with non-Indians to restore salmon runs. Elmer Ward, an attorney and member of the Yakama Nation, seconded the motion, saying of Billy Frank, “He didn’t try to change anyone’s religion or status or rights.”17 There was pushback. Whitman’s defenders pointed out that he was not a slave owner or a Confederate hero, unlike many others who are enshrined in the US Capitol. He did not order the forcible removal of Indians from their homeland, unlike Andrew Jackson, one of Tennessee’s honorees. He did not imprison and mistreat indigenous people who refused to convert to Christianity, unlike Junipero Serra, an eighteenth-century friar who represents California in the Statuary Hall. In other words, Whitman wasn’t that bad.
Rowland Thompson, a longtime lobbyist in Olympia (and Whitman College graduate) noted that President Thomas Jefferson, explorer Meriwether Lewis, and Manifest Destiny champion Thomas Hart Benton—all of whom have counties in Washington State named for them—owned slaves; and Franklin Roosevelt, whose name is attached to the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam, sent Japanese citizens to internment camps during World War II. Roger Harnack, editor and publisher of two weekly newspapers in northeastern Washington, accused the bill’s sponsors of attempting “a second Whitman Massacre” by assassinating the character of a man who had earned his place in history. “If we sit idly by and let his statues be removed, emboldened revisionists will take aim at schools and other places named in honor of Marcus Whitman,” Harnack warned.18 The bill died in committee. The statues stayed put.
The sesquicentennial of the Cayuse attack on the Whitman Mission passed with little notice in 1997. In contrast to the fanfare surrounding the fiftieth anniversary a century earlier, there were no parades, grand speeches, or somber ceremonies at the mission site. Instead, Whitman College and the Whitman Mission National Historic Site cosponsored a two-day symposium at the college with the decidedly noncelebratory title “Examining the Collision of Cultures in the Age of Multiculturalism: The Whitman Tragedy, 1847–1997.” Representatives of the Confederated Tribes participated. The goal was to show that the “tragedy” was not one-sided, affecting only whites; it also led to death, loss, dispossession, and pain for Indians.19
The keynote speaker was Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado professor and a leading scholar of the so-called “new western history”—a more inclusive, less sentimental approach to the history of the American West. Limerick included a section on the Whitmans in her groundbreaking book Legacy of Conquest, published in 1986. She depicted them as neither villains nor “martyred innocents” but simply as human. “Given the inability of Cayuses to understand Presbyterians, and the inability of Presbyterians to understand Cayuses, the trouble could only escalate,” she wrote. She asked her readers to see that “real Westerners, contrary to the old divisions between good guys and bad guys, combined the roles of victim and villain.” Acknowledging this moral complexity, Limerick wrote, does not debunk history but enriches it.20
Limerick was in the vanguard of a generation of historians and other scholars who asked new questions, uncovered new evidence, and brought new analysis to the interactions between Euro-Americans and indigenous peoples in the West. Christopher L. Miller, in his 1985 book Prophetic Worlds, examined the surprisingly similar millennial visions of Plateau Indian prophets and evangelical Christians, including the Whitmans. Julie Roy Jeffrey published a revisionist biography of Narcissa Whitman in 1991. Albert Furtwangler, in his 2005 work Bringing Indians to the Book, found it inevitable that misunderstandings would develop between missionaries, steeped in the traditions of literate Europe and Britain, and indigenous people, who passed on their values, learning, and history through words that were spoken or sung, not written. These and other writers emphasized the complicated dynamics that developed between various groups in the historic West. But much of what filtered into public consciousness still reflected what Limerick called “old divisions between good guys and bad guys.” The difference was that missionaries were now cast as bad guys.
This emphasis on good versus bad seemed particularly true at Whitman College. G. Thomas Edwards, a longtime history faculty member who helped organize the bicentennial symposium in 1997, remarked that Marcus Whitman had become almost persona non grata at his namesake institution, like a disgraced relative no one wanted to talk about. “It would be easier if the school were named Lewis and Clark,” he commented, a little ruefully. “Everyone likes them.” When Edwards began teaching at Whitman in 1964, tours of the Whitman Mission site were mandatory for first-year students. He was still leading tours in the late 1990s, but few attended. “The college does virtually nothing to recognize Marcus Whitman,” one student said. “What Whitman was attempting to do 150 years ago is un-PC in our world, and I think it scares some people.”21
Marcus and Narcissa Whitman may be convenient symbols of white arrogance and oppression when viewed through a twenty-first-century lens, but they should be understood first as products of their own time and culture. They arrived in Oregon Country as idealistic young people who deeply believed that those who did not understand God in the way they did were doomed to burn in hell for all eternity. They knew they would face hardships and dangers, certainly from nature, possibly from the humans they expected to meet in the West, whether “wild” Indians or wilder mountain men. They accepted the risks because they were convinced that God wanted them to tell Indians about Jesus and the path to salvation. Their zeal may be difficult to understand in our more secular age, but they tried to do what they thought was the right thing. And at least initially, many of the Indians the Whitmans encountered were receptive to their message and folded elements of it into their own spiritual practices.
The same proselytizing impulse took John Allen Chau, a twenty-six-year-old missionary from Vancouver, Washington, to a remote island in the Indian Ocean in November 2018. He was killed by arrows shot at him by the island’s inhabitants while he was trying to tell them that Jesus loved them.22 The Whitmans were venerated as martyrs after they died; Chau was excoriated as an ignorant, arrogant, self-serving cultural imperialist. “He has reinforced the stereotype of all missionaries as brash young colonizers trying to tame ‘primitive’ tribes,” a former Methodist missionary wrote in a letter to the New York Times.23 No one organized a militia to punish the villagers; no one erected monuments in Chau’s honor. He was a man, it would seem, out of his time.
The Whitmans were undeniably brave, tough, determined, and hardworking. Narcissa was in the late stages of pregnancy during the most strenuous part of the journey to Oregon. She often cooked three meals a day for a dozen or more people at the mission, and for the first five years, until she got a stove, she did it all over an open fire. Marcus ended many days bent with fatigue from the sheer physical labor involved in establishing and expanding his mission and farm. But they were woefully unprepared for missionary work. Their understanding of what Indians wanted or needed was based on hearsay and imagination. The primary qualifications for appointment by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were piety and good health. The board did not provide cross-cultural training. It did not expect candidates to show respect for or solidarity with the people they were to live with. In their surviving letters, neither of the Whitmans ever expressed any admiration or appreciation for native traditions, technology, or values. They had been drawn to Oregon by the idea of saving Indian souls, but they felt no affinity for the Indians they actually encountered.
The missionaries set out to transform every aspect of Cayuse culture—from diet and dress to shelter, work, and worship. They favored Indians who dressed like white people over those who wore traditional clothing. To replace a diet of wild game and native plants, they promoted one based on domesticated animals and cultivated plants. They wanted Indians to give up their seasonal rounds of hunting, fishing, and gathering and become farmers and, above all, abandon their traditional spiritual practices and fully embrace Christianity, specifically Presbyterianism. Nuclear families of Christianized Indians would then live in frame houses, not multi-family tule lodges; they would stay put; tend their fields, gardens, hogs, and cows; and accept white Christians’ notions about everything from property to gender roles.
Despite their ambitious agenda, the Whitmans gave relatively little time and attention to Indians after they reached Oregon. They were preoccupied first by the struggle to make a home in what was, for them, a wilderness. Before long, they also had to house, feed, and support the missionaries who came to “reinforce” them. The ever-increasing flow of emigrants was an added burden and distraction. Narcissa was hobbled by grief after the drowning of her daughter. Both she and Marcus suffered from repeated bouts of illness. Unrealistic expectations, lack of preparation for understanding another culture, loneliness, privation, and poor health took a toll, and not only on the Whitmans. As one writer put it, the Protestant mission field in Oregon was “littered with disillusioned missionaries.”24 Mourning “the fate of the heathen” from the comforts of the East proved to be easier than engaging with Indians as people. The Methodist Mission Board (the first to establish a presence in Oregon) ultimately sold out to the American Board; half of the missionaries dispatched by that group left the field, and the Whitmans were on the verge of leaving when their mission was attacked.
Self-imposed isolation and loneliness marked the final years of Narcissa’s life. She yearned for the company of other white women, but she disliked the four who arrived with their husbands on assignment from the American Board in 1838. They were not like the “warm-hearted revival Christians” she had grown up with.25 She felt more comfortable with the Methodists at The Dalles and in the Willamette Valley, but she was rarely able to see them. She had occasional contact with the métis wives of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, but she drew no emotional support from those relationships. She never attempted to establish friendships with Indian women. Marcus was absorbed by the demands of running what had become less a mission than a trading post and rest stop for colonists. Both of them were “out of their proper sphere,” Henry K. W. Perkins, a former Methodist missionary at The Dalles, wrote in a frank appraisal to Narcissa’s sister Jane a year after the Whitmans’ deaths. “They were not adapted to their work. They could not possibly interest & gain the affections of the natives.”
Perkins knew both Whitmans well. Narcissa spent months at The Dalles with him and his wife, Elvira, while Marcus was gone on his trip East. The Indians “feared the Doctor [but] did not love him,” Perkins wrote. “They did not love your sister.” He thought Marcus was simply too impatient and arrogant to succeed as a missionary. “Dr. Whitman in pursuing his missionary labors never so identified himself with the natives as to make their interests paramount,” Perkins added. “He looked upon them as an inferior race & doomed at no distant day to give place to a settlement of enterprising Americans. Indeed it might almost be doubted whether he felt half the interest in the natives that he did in the prospective white population.” As for Narcissa, “she loved company, society, excitement & ought always to have enjoyed it. The self-denial that took her away from it was suicidal.”26
Marcus Whitman picked a level site for his mission, snugged up against the base of a tall hill, topped by what the National Park Service now prefers to call the Whitman Memorial Obelisk (in view of snarky comments about the original name, the “Whitman Shaft”). Visitors standing next to the obelisk have a panoramic view of the Walla Walla Valley. The Blue Mountains curve east and south in the distance. Rolling hills, as rumpled as an unmade bed, stretch for miles to the west, many topped with long-bladed wind turbines. The region has become a major producer of wind- and solar-powered energy, aided in part by investments from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
Closer in, the landscape is slotted with vineyards and wineries—an ironic touch, given the Whitmans’ unfailing opposition to all things alcohol.27 In spring and fall the air here is often gritty with windblown dust, churned up by the plowing, planting, and harvesting of crops on nearby farm fields. There would have been less dust during the missionary era, when fewer than sixty acres of land were under cultivation and thigh-high grasses held the rest in place. Native grasses now flourish on parts of the mission grounds, the result of a revegetation process that began in the 1950s. Ring-necked pheasants are among the habitués. The birds, now so common throughout the United States that they seem to be a native species, have a little-known connection to the Whitmans. They were introduced to the Willamette Valley from China in 1881 by Gertrude Hall Denny and her husband, Owen Denny, then the US consul general in Shanghai. Gertrude was a daughter of Peter D. Hall, the emigrant who escaped from Waiilatpu at the beginning of the attack on the mission, reached Fort Walla Walla, and then disappeared, presumably drowned. His wife and five daughters, including ten-year-old Gertrude, were among the hostages. When Gertrude died, in 1933, she was the last survivor of the “Whitman Massacre.”28
A roadside marker just outside the entrance to the Whitman Mission National Historic Site summarizes the history of the mission in five neutral, measured sentences, including these: “Cultural differences, climaxed by a measles epidemic that killed many Cayuse, ended the missionary effort. A few suspicious Cayuse took the lives of Marcus and Narcissa and 11 others on November 29, 1847.” The sign is notable for words that do not appear: martyrs, massacre, murder, or anything to do with the “saving” of Oregon or Indian souls.
The same measured tone prevails at the mission itself, summed up in a headline on the official website: “Retribution or Revenge?” Visitors are asked to ponder whether the attack was “justified legal retribution, an act of revenge, or some combination of both.”29 Tiloukaikt and other Cayuse leaders provided their own answer to that question during the council hosted by Bishop Blanchet at the Catholic mission on the Umatilla just a few weeks after the killings. The Cayuse described the devastating effects of the measles epidemic and explained how and why they had come to believe that Marcus Whitman, assisted by his wife, was the cause. None of them took direct responsibility for the attack, but they strongly asserted that it was carried out within the boundaries of tribal law.30 In 1850, when Tiloukaikt and four others were tried for murder, their lawyers made similar arguments. The lawyers also contended, to no avail, that Americans had no legal jurisdiction in the case because the Cayuse had not yet ceded any of their homelands to the United States, and Cayuse law should prevail.31
Cayuse traditions regarding healers who did not heal were fairly well documented. Samuel Black, chief trader at Fort Walla Walla from 1825 to 1830, reported that “they Kill 2 or 3 of their Doctors every year,” acts usually carried out by enraged relatives seeking revenge for deaths attributed to the malevolence of shamans (or te-wats) who had been corrupted in one way or another.32 Black’s immediate successor, Simon McGillivray Jr., also made note of the practice, as did Archibald McKinlay, chief trader from 1841 to 1846, who claimed that between them the Cayuse and Walla Walla “shot seven of their own medicine men right by the fort during my five years’ stay there, and probably over three times that number altogether.”33 The Whitmans were fully aware of the tenuous position of te-wats in Cayuse culture. As Narcissa wrote to her parents just a few months after settling in at Waiilatpu, physicians who lost patients were “in great danger of being killed” themselves.34
The Cayuse killed eleven other people at the Whitman Mission in 1847: nine men and two teenage boys (old enough to have been considered adults in Cayuse culture), all Americans. Two American men and their adult sons who were working for Whitman at the lumber mill were spared because they claimed to be British. In contrast to the often indiscriminate attacks against Indians carried out by white militiamen and federal troops, the targeted violence at the mission was in keeping with traditional notions about warfare: kill the enemy’s men and capture the women and children. The bloodshed can also be seen as an act of self-defense, part of a struggle by Indians to regain control of their land, resources, and way of life. “I don’t know of any people on this earth who would not have done something similar given the same stress we were facing,” commented Roberta Conner, director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, adding, “I always look at it and think, was it justifiable homicide?”35
Justified or not, the Cayuse as a tribe paid a heavy price for the attack. Many were driven into hiding in the Blue Mountains; all faced harassment by volunteer militias. At the Walla Walla Treaty Council in 1855, weakened by persecution and warned that more settlers would soon overwhelm them entirely, the tribe ceded millions of acres of homelands and agreed to live on a reservation alongside people with whom they had sometimes clashed. When government surveyors finally marked the boundaries of the reservation in 1859, they included only 245,699 acres—half what had been promised—and the future town of Pendleton sat on some of the land. Federal legislation in and after 1887 led to further erosion of the tribal land base, by enabling non-Indians to acquire parcels of land allotted to individual Indians. By the early 1930s the reservation set aside for the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla had shrunk to 158,000 acres, and nearly half of it was in the hands of non-Indians. Dams, mining, railroad construction, and agricultural activities severely reduced the tribes’ ability to fish, gather, and hunt in their “usual and customary places,” as promised by treaty.
The three tribes took a series of steps, beginning in the 1940s, to reclaim sovereignty over their affairs. In 1949 they voted, by a narrow margin, to establish a single tribal government, a controversial move at the time because it diminished the role of traditional headmen. As the newly named Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, they filed two major lawsuits against the federal government. The first sought damages for the loss of fisheries due to the construction of The Dalles dam on the Columbia River at Celilo Falls. The government paid the Confederated Tribes $4.6 million to settle that claim in 1953. The second suit, seeking compensation for the hundreds of thousands of acres of land illegally excluded from the reservation, dragged on for years before it was settled in 1965 for $2.4 million.36 Meanwhile, the tribes successfully lobbied for the return of some 14,000 acres in the Johnson Creek area southeast of Pilot Rock, Oregon, bringing the reservation to its current size of about 172,000 acres—a third of the 512,000 acres promised by treaty.
The tribes marked the 150th anniversary of the Treaty Council in 2005 with “a victory celebration of survival” in Walla Walla. It began with a ceremonial procession of fifty mounted riders in full regalia, an echo of the thousands of Nez Perce and Cayuse horsemen who made a spectacular grand entry into the treaty grounds in 1855. “It was a proud moment and wonderful to see Indians with the warbonnet headdresses, on horseback, singing and hayaytám ‘war whooping,’ ” wrote Antone Minthorn, former chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “Our history is our strength. Our traditional cultures define us.”37
The Tamástslikt Cultural Institute helps preserve and convey that history. The institute, located on the reservation near Pendleton, 38 miles south of Walla Walla, is the only Indian-owned museum and research center on the 2,170-mile-long Oregon Trail. “If you want to hear about western expansionism from a tribal point of view, this is the best place to come,” says Roberta Conner, its founding director. “I’m proud to say we tell it better than anybody else.”38 Tamástslikt takes its name from a Sahaptin word meaning to “turn over” or “interpret.” Its forty-five-thousand-square-foot building is a striking piece of architecture. The main exhibit space is divided into three sections: “We Were,” “We Are,” and “We Will Be.” A recurring theme is the tribes’ relationship to horses. One of the more poignant displays is a stack of cans of dog food, representing a period in the 1930s when thousands of Cayuse horses were rounded up by the federal government, loaded into railroad boxcars, and sent to Portland for slaughter and packaging as dog food. To area farmers, herds of free-roaming horses were a nuisance.
When anthropologist Theodore Stern began his acclaimed study of the Confederated Tribes in the early 1950s, he expected to find that they had “lost their Indian qualities” and succumbed to pressures to assimilate, living as they were on a small reservation close to a major town. Instead, he found “a tenacious adherence to their cultural heritage,” as demonstrated, for example, by the persistence of the traditional Washat or Seven Drums religion (sometimes practiced in secret in those days). “On the reservation when I began my research,” Stern wrote, “there were echoes of days lived in freedom and in the subsequent bitterness of its loss.”39
One avenue for the expression of that cultural identity has been the Pendleton Round-Up, consistently rated one of the nation’s top-ten rodeos. The Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes have been an integral part of Round-Up since its beginning, in 1910. They host a week-long encampment that typically includes more than three hundred teepees—a grand village reminiscent of gatherings their ancestors held at favorite fishing or gathering sites. Many tribal members participate in an outdoor historical pageant called Happy Canyon. Roles in the pageant are often passed down within families, from one generation to the next. It may be puzzling that Indians support an event that in some ways celebrates the people responsible for the tribes’ displacement, but for many Round-Up was, and is, a “a kind of blessing,” according to Conner—a way to remember life as it once was, before the wounds created by the loss of land and freedom.40
The attack on the Whitman Mission in November 1847 by a group of Cayuse warriors led to the first Indian war in the Northwest, the creation of Oregon Territory as a federal entity, and eventually a treaty that stripped the tribe of most of its land. But that was not the end of the story for the Indians. As historian Clifford Trafzer has written, “their lives did not end in the last century, and their cultures did not fade away.”41 The Cayuse survive as part of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), with more than thirty-one hundred enrolled members and an annual operating budget of some $250 million. Roughly half the tribal members live on the reservation, along with about three hundred Indians enrolled in other tribes and fifteen hundred non-Indians. The tribes own the Wildhorse Resort (which includes a casino, hotel, recreational vehicle park, and eighteen-hole golf course) and Cayuse Technologies (a software development and training enterprise). They also have investments in wind, solar, and geothermal energy, among other business interests, and have made substantial commitments to environmental sustainability—from working to restore fish and eel runs in the Umatilla River to improving energy efficiency in tribal facilities.42 With some eighteen hundred employees and an annual payroll of about $60 million, the CTUIR is one of the largest employers in northeastern Oregon.43
“Many people romanticize about American Indian culture,” Roberta Conner told an interviewer who was studying native perspectives on sustainability in 2007, “but fundamentally they don’t understand that this has always been about land. Not about ownership, but about responsibility, accountability, and stewardship.” For Conner, that deeply rooted connection to the land means: “We’re not leaving. We’re not giving up. We’re not giving in. We’re here for the long term.
“We’re here forever.”44