TEXANS MISUNDERSTOOD THE MEANING OF THEIR VICTORY at San Jacinto, and nearly two centuries later, most still do. A monument erected above the battlefield declares, “San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world.” Even allowing for Texan pride, this grossly exaggerates the consequences of that bloody day. San Jacinto decided nothing important at all. Santa Anna’s defeat didn’t end the Texas war of independence, though the Texans soon told themselves it did. They captured the Mexican leader trying to escape the battlefield and compelled him to sign away his country’s claim on Texas. But the government in Mexico City deposed Santa Anna, disavowed his disclaimer and continued to assert possession. During the next decade Mexican armies reinvaded Texas and twice reoccupied San Antonio.
They were able to do so because Sam Houston’s dream of delivering Texas as a gift to Andrew Jackson stalled on the opposition of Northern members of Congress to the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state. The antislavery elements weren’t a majority, but a treaty of annexation required the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, which slavery’s foes were able to deny the annexationists.
The result was that the Texas republic, envisioned as a swiftly transitional step to American statehood, acquired an unexpected permanence. Texans of later generations would wax nostalgic about their state’s experience as an independent republic. A few Texans at the time warmed to the idea, imagining Texas expanding far to the west and becoming a great nation of its own. But most Texans, facing an empty treasury, a worthless currency, harrowing raids by Comanches, and embarrassing vulnerability to the Mexican army, still longed for attachment to the country from which the great majority of them had come. Texans would eventually profess to disdain the power of the American federal government, but in the dicey decade after San Jacinto that power seemed a comforting embrace they could only wish for.
Houston was shrewd enough, following his victory in a battle his men had forced him to fight, not to air his belief that the question of Texas wouldn’t be settled until the United States went to war with Mexico. He had intended for this to happen in 1836, but his men’s mutiny prevented it. San Jacinto, far from resolving the Texas question, left any resolution pending, awaiting that war.
WEEKS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK OF THE TEXAS REVOLUTION, the annual fur-trading rendezvous took place on the Green River in modern Wyoming. Joe Meek attended, as usual, and met two men who were unusual for the mountain fair. The rendezvous had acquired a colorful reputation that drew artists, scientists, writers and even tourists, but Marcus Whitman and his partner Samuel Parker were travelers of a different sort. They came west to scout the feasibility of travel to Oregon for the purpose of founding a religious mission.
They were answering a call by the native peoples of the Far West for education in the Christian gospel. Such, at any rate, was how Whitman and Parker and much of Protestant America interpreted an extraordinary tale recounted two years earlier in the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald and reprinted in numerous papers afterward. An article about the relocation of the Wyandot Indians from their Ohio homeland to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi contained a letter from one of the Wyandots, a Christian convert named William Walker, to an Ohio friend. Walker was surveying the territory for his tribe and reporting on its suitability as a new tribal home. As an aside he mentioned a visit to William Clark, Meriwether Lewis’s old partner. “Immediately after we landed in St. Louis on our way to the west,” Walker wrote, “I proceeded to General Clarke’s, superintendent of Indian affairs, to present our letters of introduction from the secretary of war, and to receive the same from him to the different Indian agents in the upper country. While in his office and transacting business with him, he informed me that three chiefs from the Flat-Head nation were in his house and were quite sick, and that one (the fourth) had died a few days ago. They were from the west of the Rocky Mountains.”
Walker asked to see the guests. Clark granted permission. Walker had heard of the Flatheads but had never encountered any in person. “I had always supposed from their being called ‘Flat-Heads’ that the head was actually flat on top; but this is not the case. The head is flattened thus”—he appended a sketch, which the author of the article, or perhaps the editor, improved. Walker went on explain the method of flattening the skull, by means of a board pressed against an infant’s forehead.
Then he got to the part of the story that sent shivers of holy joy up the spines of the readers of the Christian Advocate. “The distance they had travelled on foot was nearly three thousand miles to see Gen. Clarke, their great father, as they called him, he being the first American officer they ever became acquainted with, and having much confidence in him, they had come to consult him as they said, upon very important matters. Gen. C. related to me the object of their mission, and, my dear friend, it is impossible for me to describe to you my feelings while listening to his narrative. I will here relate it as briefly as I well can. It appeared that some white man had penetrated into their country, and happened to be a spectator at one of their religious ceremonies, which they scrupulously perform at stated periods. He informed them that their mode of worshipping the supreme Being was radically wrong, and instead of being acceptable and pleasing, it was displeasing to him; he also informed them that the white people away toward the rising of the sun had been put in possession of the true mode of worshipping the great Spirit. They had a book containing directions how to conduct themselves in order to enjoy his favor and hold converse with him; and with this guide, no one need go astray, but every one that would follow the directions laid down there could enjoy, in this life, his favor, and after death would be received into the country where the great Spirit resides, and live forever with him.”
The Indians had called a council to consider this information. “Some said, if this be true, it is certainly high time we were put in possession of this mode, and if our mode of worshipping be wrong and displeasing to the great Spirit, it is time we had laid it aside. We must know something more about this; it is a matter that cannot be put off; the sooner we know about it the better. They accordingly deputed four of their chiefs to proceed to St. Louis to see their great father, Gen. Clarke, to inquire of him, having no doubt but he would tell them the whole truth about it.”
The four chiefs had done just that. Clark, surprised at their appearance in St. Louis and sobered by the responsibility suddenly placed on his shoulders, proceeded—according to Walker’s account—to confirm the truth of what the lone white man had said and to instruct the chiefs succinctly in the message of the Old and New Testaments.
“Poor fellows,” Walker went on, “they were not all permitted to return home to their people with the intelligence. Two died in St. Louis, and the remaining two, though somewhat indisposed, set out for their native land. Whether they reached home or not is not known. The change of climate and diet operated very severely upon their health. Their diet when at home is chiefly vegetables and fish. If they died on their way home, peace be to their manes! They died inquirers after the truth.”
THE AVERAGE READER OF THE CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE WAS IN NO position to question certain aspects of Walker’s letter, starting with the fact that the visit to St. Louis he described took place in 1831 but he didn’t get around to revealing it until 1833. Then there was the matter of the identity of the Indians. Independent evidence suggested that the visitors to William Clark were Nez Perce Indians rather than Flatheads, although one might have been half Flathead. Consequently the illustration of the flattened head was almost certainly an artistic flourish, since, in any event, the Flatheads didn’t actually flatten heads; it was the Chinook and their kin who made the pointed heads, by contrast with which the Salish people known as Flatheads had ordinary, or flat, heads.
Yet these minor matters paled beside the astonishing essence of the story: that four enlightened heathens—soon dubbed the “Wise Men of the West”—had come east in search of the proper way to worship the Great Spirit. What made the story more astonishing still, and on that account perhaps more suspect, was that it reached the American East just as the Second Great Awakening was approaching its height of evangelizing fervor. This Christian revival movement—called the Second Awakening to distinguish it from an eighteenth-century forerunner—rejected the often-elitist rationalism of the Enlightenment in favor of a populist emotionalism. Baptists and Methodists benefited most from the surging demand for a religion a believer could feel, but the desire for a faith that transformed one’s life touched Presbyterians and Congregationalists too.
Nowhere was the Awakening stronger than in western New York, called the “burnt-over district” for the revivals that swept across it, consuming the fuel of unbelief. Marcus Whitman was living in the village of Wheeler, in the heart of the burnt-over district, in the autumn of 1834, when the Reverend Samuel Parker came through summoning support for a mission to the Oregon country. The revivalists weren’t content to save souls in the civilized regions of America; their zeal burned to share the gospel with heathens in distant lands. Some missionaries went out to the East Indies, others to the islands of the South Pacific. Parker, having read of the appeal of the Wise Men of the West, aimed for Oregon.
Marcus Whitman was a struggling doctor with a stingy practice and chronic aches from riding too many miles to see patients amid the harsh winters of western New York. He had been “saved,” in the meaning of the revivalists, but he had never acted on his faith in the way many others in the movement did. His conscience nagged him to do so. He had scarcely heard of Oregon, but when Samuel Parker related the miraculous story of the Wise Men of the West, Whitman perceived the answer to his professional, physical and existential problems. He decided at once to give up his medical practice, move away from New York and devote his life to saving lost souls.
Four months later he was in St. Louis with Parker, heading west under the sponsorship of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The two men visited the offices of the American Fur Company and secured permission to travel with the company’s annual caravan to the summer rendezvous. For Parker and Whitman the journey was a reconnaissance. They would not go all the way to the Columbia River, their eventual goal; rather, they would assay the prospects for taking women and wagons to Oregon. The former were crucial to the mission board’s evangelizing strategy; experience had shown that unmarried men, even those of the cloth, were too often tempted beyond their strength by heathen women. Christian wives kept their husbands’ passions in check. The wagons were important for the women, who would want to carry more west than could fit on the back of a mule, and for the general provisioning of the missions. Goods might be shipped west by sailing vessel, but the American Mission Board was aware that the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled the lower Columbia, and the board didn’t want its missions dependent on the goodwill of a British company. An overland connection to the United States would be far preferable to running the Hudson’s Bay gauntlet.
By this time steamboats serviced the Missouri River as far as Liberty, Missouri, just east of the northward bend in the river. Parker and Whitman dipped into the funds the mission board had appropriated for their journey and purchased tickets. At Liberty their western experience really began. Friction developed at once between the God-fearing missionaries and the frequently God-damning mountain men to whom they attached themselves. The members of the caravan hadn’t been consulted about being saddled with the Bible-thumping greenhorns, and they didn’t like it. Parker asked the caravan leader if he and Whitman could put some of their provisions in the fur company’s wagons. The caravan leader said they could not; the added weight would burden the horses. Anyway, in the West each man hauled his own provisions. The rank and file of the caravan were even less friendly toward the missionaries, who cramped the mountaineers’ style and slowed the progress of the caravan. The missionaries refused to travel on the Sabbath, and though the caravan didn’t wait for them, the overall pace was inevitably slowed as the missionaries struggled to catch up on the following days. Parker and Whitman felt the hostility, with Parker fearing at times for his and Whitman’s lives.
Things got worse before they got better. The caravan had reached Sioux country when several of the travelers came down with cholera. This virulent disease had been unknown in North America, even among whites, before the 1830s. But during the first years of that decade it leapt the Atlantic and swept from Canada down the Atlantic seaboard and over the Appalachians into the Mississippi Valley. The outbreak the American Fur Company caravan encountered was likely a remnant of the initial epidemic, and it hit the caravan hard. “The weather was very warm, and there were showers from day to day,” Parker observed by way of noting circumstances in which the disease commonly spread. Other contributors were the fault of the caravan crew themselves. “The intemperate habits of the men, and their manner of living, probably had a tendency to induce the disease.” Three men died and several others were at death’s door.
But heaven, and Marcus Whitman, came to the rescue, Parker explained. The sick men survived “through the blessing of God upon the assiduous attentions of Doct. Whitman, my associate, and the free use of powerful medicines.” The cholera outbreak, and the way it ended, might well have spared Parker and Whitman an evil fate. “This afflictive scourge, so far as respected Dr. W. and myself, was providential,” Parker said. “The assistance we rendered the sick, and the medical skill of the Doctor, converted those into permanent friends who had so disliked the restraints which our presence imposed upon them that, as they afterwards confessed, they had plotted our death and intended on the first convenient occasion to put their purpose in execution.”
Hardly had the caravan survived the cholera when several of its members did something that made Parker wonder who were the civilized and who the savages. “A man by the name of Garrio, a half blood Indian chief of the Arickara nation, was shot under very aggravated circumstances,” Parker wrote. “Garrio and his family were residing in a log cabin on the Papillon River. Six or seven men, half intoxicated, went down to his house in the night, called him up, took him away a half mile, and shot him with six balls, scalped him, and left him unburied. The reason they assigned for doing so was that he was a bad man and had killed white men.”
Parker didn’t know if this was true, but the presumption of the vigilantes appalled him. “If he was guilty, who authorized them to take his life?” The incident would surely spawn more violence. “The Arickara nation will remember this and probably take revenge on some innocent persons. This, I apprehend, is the way Indian wars are often produced. While we charge the Indians with inveterate ferociousness and inhuman brutality, we forget the too numerous wrongs and outrages committed upon them, which incite them to revenge.”
THE CARAVAN ASCENDED THE PLATTE AND THEN THE Sweetwater. August brought them to the Continental Divide and the beginning of the Oregon country. They benefited, at two-decades’ remove, from the signal accomplishment of the Astor project, the one great success amid the multiple disappointments and ultimate failure of the grand design. A party of Astorians returning east in 1812 was struggling toward the crest of the Rockies when a Shoshone told them of a better route over the Rockies than those followed by Lewis and Clark and the Astorians themselves when heading west. “Learning that this Indian is perfectly acquainted with the route,” wrote Robert Stuart, the leader of the Astor group, “I without loss of time offered him a pistol, a blanket of blue cloth, an axe, a knife, an awl, a fathom of blue beads, a looking glass and a little powder and ball if he would guide us to the other side, which he immediately accepted.” The Shoshone evidently changed his mind, for two days later he absconded, taking Stuart’s horse with him.
Yet the hint of an easy pass prompted Stuart and the others to look for it, and with effort they found it. Upon reaching the settlements on the Missouri they shared what they had learned with others, and thereafter the South Pass route became the standard for parties bound for Oregon.
To most travelers the South Pass seemed scarcely a pass at all. “The passage through these mountains is in a valley so gradual in the ascent and descent that I should not have known we were approaching them had it not been that as we advanced the atmosphere gradually became cooler,” Samuel Parker wrote. The valley varied in width from two to fifteen miles. “Though there are some elevations and depressions in this valley, yet comparatively speaking it is level; and the summit, where the waters divide which flow into the Atlantic and into the Pacific, is about six thousand feet above the level of the ocean.” Parker was mistaken about the elevation, which is closer to 7,500 feet, but he wasn’t wrong in noting that the South Pass made crossing the great range of the American West easier than crossing much smaller ranges in the East.
TWO DAYS LATER THEY REACHED THE RENDEZVOUS, WHERE Marcus Whitman won additional respect from the mountain men by turning surgeon. He removed an iron arrowhead, three inches long, from the back of Jim Bridger, where it had lodged in a fight with the Blackfeet three years earlier. The extraction was tricky, as the tip of the arrow had bent upon hitting a large bone, and the bent tip acted like a barb, holding the arrow in place. Moreover, cartilage had grown around the arrow. But Bridger wanted it out, and Whitman obliged. “The Doctor pursued the operation with great self-possession and perseverance,” Parker recorded, “and his patient manifested equal firmness. The Indians looked on meanwhile with countenances indicating wonder, and in their own peculiar manner expressed great astonishment when it was extracted.” Whitman’s medical skills would prove both a boon and a bane in his subsequent work with Indians, for now they seemed marvelous. The mountaineers certainly thought so. A second trapper asked to have an arrow removed from his shoulder, and Whitman obliged. Many others queued up for minor surgeries and for medicines for assorted ailments.
At the rendezvous, Parker and Whitman met Nez Perce and Flathead Indians. The two missionaries referred to the Flathead (or Nez Perce) delegation to St. Louis described in the Christian Advocate, and they said their present journey was a response to the plea of that delegation to learn about the gospel. They asked whether the Indians indeed wished them to come to Oregon and teach them the ways of God. “The oldest chief of the Flatheads arose,” Parker recorded, “and said, ‘he was old, and did not expect to know much more; he was deaf and could not hear, but his heart was made glad, very glad, to see what he had never seen before, a man near to God (meaning a minister of the gospel).’” The principal chief of the Nez Perce spoke in a similar vein. “He had heard from white men a little about God, which had only gone into his ears; he wished to know enough to have it go down into his heart, to influence his life, and teach his people.”
Parker drew the crucial, and welcome, conclusion: “The Nez Perces and Flathead Indians present a promising field for missionary labor, white for the harvest, and the indications of divine providence in regard to it are made plain by their anxiety to obtain Christian knowledge.” Parker and Whitman decided that their first mission in Oregon must be among these peoples.
So encouraged were the two missionaries that they decided that Whitman should return east at once and gather associates and supplies for a full-fledged expedition to Oregon the following year. Leaving Parker to continue the reconnaissance, Whitman again joined the fur company caravan when, having exchanged its provisions for furs, it retraced the route over South Pass and down the Missouri to St. Louis. The caravan reached that city in early November. Whitman continued east to New York, arriving home in December.