MORE THAN EAGERNESS TO SAVE SOULS HASTENED Marcus Whitman on his return. Love provided an equal spur, for he was about to be married. Narcissa Prentiss, his fiancée, was living in Amity, New York, not far from Whitman’s Wheeler. Unmarried at twenty-six, Narcissa was almost a spinster by the standards of her day. Yet she was not without suitors, including one Henry Spalding, whose proposal of marriage she rejected. Spalding, a proud man, took the rejection hard, to Narcissa’s dismay.
She decided Whitman was more to her liking. He was also essential to some life plans she was just then formulating. Narcissa had attended a talk by Samuel Parker similar to that in which Parker had won Whitman to the cause of an Oregon mission. Parker’s effect on Narcissa was almost identical. She had been “saved” but was seeking an outlet for her energy and devotion. She had taught school but was weary of the classroom. She desired something more. “Is there a place for an unmarried female in my Lord’s vineyard?” she asked Parker after the lecture.
Parker said he didn’t know but would check. “Are females wanted?” he wrote the American Mission Board. “A Miss Narcissa Prentiss of Amity is very anxious to go to the heathen. Her education is good—piety conspicuous—her influence is good. She will offer herself if needed.”
The board replied that unmarried women were not wanted. Married women, yes; unmarried women, no. Married couples were the model missionaries, and the board would stick with the model.
If Narcissa was discouraged by the reply, she didn’t stay discouraged long. Instead she addressed her deficiency by becoming engaged to Marcus Whitman, six years her elder. Whitman visited friends in Amity in 1835 prior to his western reconnaissance with Parker. The friends knew Narcissa and were aware of her interest in missionary work, and introductions were made. Before Whitman’s visit ended, he and Narcissa had reached an understanding that they would become the model couple the mission board wanted.
They might well have concluded that it was a match made in heaven. They were, after all, embarking on heaven’s work. Was it also a meeting of the hearts? Not at first. “We had to make love somewhat abruptly and must do our courtship now we are married,” Narcissa wrote to Parker’s wife not long after she and Whitman were wed. But in an age when the practicalities of marriage were often considered as important as its romantic elements, this ordering was not unusual. They were married; they would learn to love each other.
AND THEY WOULD DO SO IN THE FACE OF CHALLENGES NOT confronting most newlyweds. Narcissa and Marcus Whitman traveled by steamboat to Cincinnati, where they were joined by Henry and Eliza Spalding. Henry had rebounded from Narcissa’s spurning sufficiently to find a wife. Like Marcus and Narcissa, Henry and Eliza were fired by zeal to convert the Indians of Oregon. The mission board judged that two couples would do better than one on the western frontier and sent them out together. The board didn’t know the background between Henry Spalding and Narcissa, and neither, apparently, did Marcus Whitman or Eliza Spalding. Henry Spalding and Narcissa Whitman seem not to have spoken of it, and Narcissa’s letters and journal suggest she thought the ill feelings were in the past.
They continued by steamboat to Liberty, Missouri, where they prepared for the overland journey. Like Marcus Whitman the previous year, the foursome would join the annual caravan of the American Fur Company. But this time they would go all the way to Oregon, and they purchased provisions accordingly. They bought flour, salt and other foodstuffs they couldn’t procure by hunting, fishing or trading along the way; trade goods for bartering with the Indians; seeds and equipment for starting a farm in Oregon; tools of various sorts; medical supplies; furniture and bedding; clothing and shoes; books and writing materials; guns, powder and lead. They bought the all-important wagons, a heavy one and a lighter one, which would carry the supplies and the women. They bought horses and mules to ride and to pull the wagons, and four saddles. The women’s were side-saddles, considered appropriate for the demure sex when they chose to ride. They bought seventeen cattle, including four dairy cows, to stock the Oregon farm.
Marcus Whitman had known he would pay a frontier premium for all this, but the total bill shocked him. “Our expenses here have been much worse than I expected,” he wrote to the mission board. “Horses and cattle cost over $1,000.00.” But prices would only get higher—much higher for some items—farther west, and so he paid what the sellers demanded.
At Liberty the Whitmans and Spaldings were joined by another New Yorker, William Gray. The mission board had appointed him as a “secular agent”: an all-purpose laborer and craftsman who would do or oversee much of the physical work of building houses, barns, fences, coops and sties when the missionaries got to Oregon. Whitman himself secured the services of two men to help with the animals and the setting up and breaking down of camp on the trail. Also traveling with the group were a pair of Nez Perce boys who had accompanied Whitman east the previous year to learn English and see how the white people lived. Their fathers had let them go after receiving Whitman’s assurance that he would return them the following year, as he was now doing. A third Nez Perce, who had traveled east on his own and wanted to return to his home country, completed the entourage.
THE GREEN RIVER WAS AGAIN THE SITE OF THE ANNUAL RENDEZVOUS. William Gray marveled at what he saw. “We will pass through this city of about fifteen hundred inhabitants—composed of all classes and conditions of men, and on this occasion two classes of women—starting from a square log pen 18 by 18, with no doors, except two logs that had been cut so as to leave a space about feet from the ground two feet wide and six feet long, designed for an entrance, as also a place to hand out goods and take in furs,” Gray wrote. “It was covered with poles, brush on top of the poles; in case of rain, which we had twice during our stay at the rendezvous, the goods were covered with canvas, or tents thrown over them. Lumber being scarce in that vicinity, floors, doors, as well as sash and glass, were dispensed with. The spaces between the logs were sufficient to admit all the light requisite to do business in this primitive store.” The trading hut stood a modest distance from the Green River, and the tents, saddles and paraphernalia of the fur company and its men formed two lines that ran down to the river. The lines of the tents, together with the river and the hut, set the boundaries of an area into which the company’s horses and mules might be driven and be defended in case of Indian attack.
West of the fur company’s camp was the camp of the hunters and trappers who came to the rendezvous to renew their supplies and acquaintances. East of the company’s camp was the camp of the missionary group. A mile away, up Horse Creek, which entered the Green River just below the fur company camp, began the camps of various Indian tribes: Bannocks, Snakes, Flatheads and Nez Perces. These camps were similarly designed for defense, for though the tribes were at peace at the time of the rendezvous, none let down their guard. “The whole city was a military camp,” Gray wrote. “Every little camp had its own guards to protect its occupants and property from being stolen by its neighbor. The arrow or the ball decided any dispute that might occur. The only law known for horse-stealing was death to the thief, if the owner or the guard could kill him in the act. If he succeeded in escaping, the only remedy for the man who lost his horse was to buy, or steal another and take his chances in escaping the arrow or ball of the owner or guard. It was quite fashionable in this city for all to go well armed, as the best and quickest shot gained the case in dispute.”
The rendezvous began in earnest with the arrival of the fur company caravan, which was the raison d’être of the gathering. The Indians celebrated the arrival with a dramatic procession through the temporary city. “The Nez Perces and Flatheads, passing from their camps down the Horse Creek, joined the Snake and Bannock warriors, all dressed and painted in their gayest uniforms, each having a company of warriors in war garb, that is, naked, except a single cloth, and painted, carrying their war weapons, bearing their war emblems and Indian implements of music, such as skins drawn over hoops with rattles and trinkets to make a noise,” Gray recalled. He and the Whitmans and Spaldings were alarmed. “When the cavalcade, amounting to full five (some said six) hundred Indian warriors (though I noticed quite a number of native belles covered with beads), commenced coming up through the plain in sight of our camps, those of us who were not informed as to the object or design of this demonstration began to look at our weapons and calculate on a desperate fight.” They drove their horses, mules and cows into an area they thought they could defend and turned their guns outward. But veterans of the rendezvous laughingly explained that this was just for show. Gray adduced evidence on his own: “From the fact that no scalps were borne in the procession, I concluded this must be entirely a peace performance, and gotten up for the occasion.”
The performance was especially spirited on the part of the Nez Perce, who had learned that the fur company caravan was accompanied by the missionaries, including the two women. The Nez Perce were delighted by this response to their entreaties and were fascinated by the white women, who looked out on the procession from the door of their tent. “The Indians would pass and repass the tent, to get a sight of the two women belonging to the white men,” Gray recorded. In short order the Nez Perce became particularly enamored of Eliza Spalding, who learned their language with surprising speed. Narcissa Whitman was less adept with languages and made less effort.
NARCISSA WAS DISTRACTED BY FREQUENT CALLERS FROM THE camp of the mountain men. “Among these veteran Rocky Mountain hunters was a tall man, with long black hair, smooth face, dark eyes (inclining to turn his head a little to one side, as much as to say, ‘I can tell you all about it’), a harum-scarum, don’t-care sort of a man, full of ‘life and fun in the mountains,’ as he expressed it,” Gray wrote. Gray didn’t know this man, but it was Joe Meek. “He came and paid his respects to the ladies, and said he had been in the mountains several years; he had not seen a white woman for so long he had almost forgotten how they looked.” Narcissa discovered Meek’s penchant for telling stories. “Mrs. Whitman asked him if he ever had any difficulty or fights with the Indians,” Gray recounted. “‘That we did,’ said he. ‘One time I was with Bridger’s camp; we were traveling along that day, and the Blackfeet came upon us. I was riding an old mule. The Indians were discovered some distance off, so all the party put whip to their horses and started to get to a place where we could defend ourselves. My old mule was determined not to move, with all the beating I could give her, so I sung out to the boys to stop and fight the Indians where we were; they kept on, however. Soon, my old mule got sight of the Blackfeet coming; she pricked up her ears, and on she went like a streak, passed the boys, and away we went. I sung out to the boys, as I passed, “Come on, boys, there is no use to stop and fight the Indians here.”’”
Gray observed that Meek was accompanied by a small child and an Indian woman. The woman was a Nez Perce, and her name was Umentucken. Meek had met her in the mountains and fallen in love. “She was the most beautiful Indian woman I ever saw,” Gray remembered. They were married, after the mountain fashion, and they had a child.
Gray saw Meek giving the little boy instruction in speaking English. “The father seemed, on my first noticing him, to be teaching this son of his to say, ‘God d—n you,’ doubtless considering this prayer the most important one to teach his son to repeat, in the midst of the wild scenes with which he was surrounded.”
AT THE RENDEZVOUS THE WHITMAN PARTY LOST ITS ESCORT and had to find a new one. The American Fur Company caravan would go no farther; it had to return with its furs to St. Louis. The band of Nez Perce sought to persuade the missionaries to travel west with them. Whitman appreciated the offer, partly because it reconfirmed the tribe’s desire to have a mission planted among them. But the Indians traveled swiftly and light, and he wasn’t sure his party could keep up.
Fortunately, there arrived at the rendezvous a group from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The appearance of the Bay men was no accident; the British company was patrolling the eastern frontier of its Oregon domain. John McLeod was the leader of the group; he was assisted by Thomas McKay, the stepson and assistant of John McLoughlin. The two Bay men wanted to make sure the American Fur Company didn’t get ideas about penetrating farther west. The Bay Company had recently blocked a sally by an American named Nathaniel Wyeth, who had established a trading post on the Snake River, called Fort Hall, by buying Wyeth out. McLeod and McKay were escorting Wyeth to the rendezvous to ensure that he left the Oregon country. They themselves would be heading back to Fort Vancouver, and they offered to let the Whitman party go with them.
Had they been less focused on their rivals in the fur trade, they might not have been so helpful. To be sure, the Whitmans and the Spaldings weren’t trappers or traders and so posed no immediate threat to the Bay Company’s monopoly. But the missionaries represented a more distant threat: the settlement of Oregon by Americans. Where wagons and women could go, families could follow. And where American families went, American governance would eventually follow. The Bay Company operated profitably on soil controlled formally by Britain or informally by its own agents, men like John McLoughlin, but it would not be able to do so on territory controlled by the United States.
Yet under the Anglo-American treaty of joint occupation for Oregon, neither side could hinder or molest the nationals of the other. The Hudson’s Bay Company was willing to test the treaty in the rough-and-tumble world of the mountain men, squeezing and extorting its competitors wherever it could. But the Bay men, starting with John McLeod and Thomas McKay, appreciated that troubling women and missionaries would never do. Better to offer help, and thereby perhaps influence where the missionaries went and what they did.
“DEAREST MOTHER,” NARCISSA WROTE. “WE COMMENCED our journey to Walla Walla July 18, 1836, under the protection of Mr. McLeod and his company.” Walla Walla was a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the river of that name, near its confluence with the Columbia some two hundred miles above Fort Vancouver. It lay in the country of the Nez Perce and seemed to Marcus Whitman a likely place to start looking for a mission site. “The Flat Head and Nez Perce Indians and some lodges of the Snake tribe accompany us to Fort Hall,” Narcissa continued. “While they are with us, we shall make but one camp a day.”
Because John McLeod chose to travel with the Indians to Fort Hall, the missionaries did too. But the Indians were going to take a northern route from that point on the Snake River, to accommodate the Flatheads, while the Bay Company party would head more directly west toward Walla Walla. Until the parting, the missionaries felt obliged to accommodate the Indians’ rapid pace, and they learned to dispense with their noontime camp.
The missionaries labored under a special handicap: their wagons. The route from the Green River to the Columbia was no road; in spots it was barely a trail. But the missionaries had their orders—to get the wagons through—and Marcus Whitman took them very seriously. The rocks and narrows eventually forced him to abandon one of the vehicles, but he clung to the other more zealously than ever. The traders and the Indians urged him to unload it and pack its contents on horses and mules. They hated the delay. The Hudson’s Bay Company men seconded the advice, for a different reason: They wanted to prove that wagons could not get through. They hoped to keep as much of Oregon to themselves as possible.
Even Narcissa Whitman wished he would give it up. “Husband has had a tedious time with the wagon today,” she wrote on July 25. “Got set in the creek this morning while crossing, was obliged to wade considerably in getting it out. After that in going between two mountains, on the side of one so steep that it was difficult for horses to pass, the wagon was upset twice. Did not wonder at this at all. It was a greater wonder that it was not turning a somerset continually.” She feared for her husband. “It is not very grateful to my feelings to see him wear out with such excessive fatigue,” she observed. “All the most difficult part of the way he has walked in his laborious attempt to take the wagon over.”
Thirty hard miles farther she thought he would have to give it up. “One of the axle trees of the wagon broke today. Was a little rejoiced, for we were in hopes they would leave it and have no more trouble with it.” But still he would not admit defeat. “Our rejoicing was in vain,” she wrote.
They reached Fort Hall, where they received the hospitality of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Whitmans and Spaldings slept indoors for the first time since crossing the Missouri River. They also bade good-bye to the Indians. The Nez Perce again attempted to persuade the missionaries to join them. “The whole tribe are exceedingly anxious to have us go with them, use every argument they can invent to prevail on us to do so,” Narcissa observed. Whitman and the others declined. “We all think it not best. We are very much fatigued and wish to get through as soon as possible.”
John McLeod and the other Hudson’s Bay men told Whitman that the route from Fort Hall to the Columbia was even rougher than that which they had covered. He must surely give up the wagon now.
He considered the matter once more and arrived at a compromise. Reasoning that two wheels, if not as good as four, would be better than none, he cut the wagon in half, making a cart of the front and loading the rear wheels and axle aboard. If he could get the cart through, he could rebuild the wagon bed and reconstitute the four-wheeler. And he could still claim that a wheeled vehicle had made it to Oregon.
The broad Snake River Valley vexed the travelers as no part of the trail had done so far. In some places it was a burning desert, in others a boggy wetland. Mosquitoes drove the travelers and the stock nearly mad. “We were so swarmed with mosquitoes as to be scarcely able to see,” Narcissa wrote.
They forded the Snake River above Fort Boise. Whitman’s cart barely survived. “Husband had considerable difficulty in crossing the cart,” Narcissa wrote. “Both the cart and mules turned upside down in the river, entangled in the harness. The mules would have drowned, but for a desperate struggle to get them ashore. Then after putting two of the strongest horses before the cart and two men swimming behind to steady it, they succeeded in getting it over.”
Fort Boise marked the beginning of the last leg of the journey to the Columbia. The Snake River turned north into the impassable Hell’s Canyon, forcing travelers to strike out over the slightly less daunting Blue Mountains. At last Marcus Whitman conceded that his wagon, now a cart, wasn’t going to make it all the way. He left it at Fort Boise, on the understanding that he might send for it later.
Struggling up the steep ridges of the Blue Mountains tested the weary muscles and bones of the travelers, but picking a way down tested their nerves. “Before noon we began to descend one of the most terrible mountains for steepness and length I have yet seen,” Narcissa wrote on August 29. “It was like winding stairs in its descent and in some places almost perpendicular. We were a long time descending it. The horses appeared to dread the hill as much as we did. They would turn and wind in a zigzag manner all the way down. The men usually walked but I could not get permission to, neither did I desire it much.… Our ride this afternoon exceeded everything we have had yet.”
But the day ended in triumph. They were still searching for a suitable camping site when they crested a final ridge that looked to the north and west. “We had a view of the valley of the Columbia River,” Narcissa wrote. They stopped, caught their breath, and gazed at the goal toward which they had struggled so long. “It was beautiful,” she said.