“An Unheard-of Journey for Females”
When Narcissa Whitman prepared to go west in 1836, she took with her a pair of rubber boots, a passport from the US War Department, and a husband she barely knew. Shortly after her death, almost exactly ten years later, a friend who knew her well, the Reverend Henry Perkins, wrote a letter to her sister back East. It contained these truthful, if not perhaps particularly consoling, words. Narcissa “was not a missionary, but a woman,” he wrote, “a highly-gifted, polished American lady” who was adapted to a very different destiny from the one she found among the Cayuse in Oregon Territory. “She loved company, society, excitement and ought always to have enjoyed it,” he added. “The self-denial that took her away from it was suicidal.”6
It had not always seemed that way. Narcissa Whitman was born Narcissa Prentiss in Prattsburgh, in the state of New York, on March 14, 1808. The daughter of a prosperous middle-class farmer and carpenter, she was well liked, vivacious, and widely admired for her beautiful singing voice. She was also unusually well-educated for a woman of her day, having attended not one but two local schools where she had received some training as a teacher. Like the rest of her family, she was a devout member of the recently reorganized, and vigorously evangelizing, Presbyterian Church.9
The early nineteenth century was a time of intense religious revivalism in the northern United States, a period sometimes referred to as the Second Great Awakening, in which women played an unusually active role.10 Narcissa grew up steeped in stories of heroic missionary activity among the “benighted heathen,” disseminated not only from the pulpit, but also from a flourishing evangelical press. They told of women, sometimes very young ones, not so very different from Narcissa herself. These women led noble, self-sacrificing lives, often in excitingly “exotic” places—South America, India, Africa—lives that took them far away from the usual domestic constraints of provincial life. The fact that many of these role models died during their missions abroad only added to their aura of saintliness and heroism.
While the undertaking was acknowledged to be a formidable one, the optimistic tone of such articles suggested that it was not impossible. Nowhere were the vast cultural and geographical challenges of such enterprises dwelled upon. Instead, these mission reports seemed to suggest that female missionaries, unlike their male counterparts, needed no particular training to be successful. Piety, cheerful devotion to the cause, and perhaps a little teaching and hymn singing were all that seemed to be required.
Aged sixteen, Narcissa seems to have undergone some kind of religious experience, and from this time on her heart, too, was set on becoming a missionary. As an unmarried female, however, her chances of becoming one were vanishingly small, so when a proposal of marriage came to her, apparently out of the blue, it must have seemed as if it were the hand of Providence at work. Marcus Whitman was a thirty-two-year-old medical doctor who, like Narcissa, also dreamed of a life of Christian service in foreign parts. Although it is not known exactly when the couple first met, since they attended churches that were only six miles distant from each other it is possible that they had been acquainted, albeit distantly, for some time. Both had been inspired by a preacher, the Reverend Samuel Parker, who in December 1834 was traveling through the communities of New York, preaching and raising money for what he hoped would be an exciting new mission.
Parker’s story was an electrifying one. It told of four Flatheads from a distant land somewhere “west of the Rocky Mountains” who, having become curious about Christianity, had traveled to Saint Louis in the autumn of 1831, seeking out missionaries who would be willing to travel to their communities and bring them the word of God.11 Unbeknownst to each other, both Narcissa and Marcus had volunteered. While Reverend Parker had initially rejected Narcissa’s offer of help, Marcus was quickly appointed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to accompany Parker on an exploratory expedition to Oregon country. During the application process the board had also made inquiries as to Marcus’s marital status, with the suggestion that if, in the future, a permanent mission were to go ahead, a wife would be a desirable helpmate. Knowing of her missionary ambitions, it is highly likely that Narcissa Prentiss was suggested by Reverend Parker as a suitable partner.
On the eve of what would be his first journey to Oregon country, Dr. Whitman traveled to Narcissa’s home to sound her out. There was nothing romantic in either his proposal or his appearance. Marcus was neither a polished nor a particularly sophisticated man—he was said by those who knew him to have “easy, don’t care habits” and to lack “a sense of etiquette”—but he gave the impression of both purpose and energy. If Narcissa were ever to fulfil her dream of becoming a missionary, this was her chance. Over a single weekend, February 22 and 23 of 1835, the couple came to what was, to all intents and purposes, not so much an engagement as a business agreement.
While today this might seem like not only a bizarre but even a reckless decision, it was not unusual in missionary circles of the time. That Dr. Whitman must have seemed not only suitable but also pleasing to Narcissa is evinced by the fact that his was not the first offer of marriage she had received. A few years previously a man named Henry Spalding, he too burning with missionary zeal and in search of a suitable wife to help him in his work, had also proposed to her, but Narcissa had refused him—a fact that, in a bizarre twist of fate, would soon come back to haunt her.
Even as Marcus Whitman’s wife-to-be, Narcissa’s future was still very far from certain. Not only did the mission on which she had set her sights not yet exist, but Oregon was not even Oregon. In the 1830s the Pacific Northwest was still a foreign country, as geographically and culturally distant as China or Africa. Like all Americans, the Whitmans would have to obtain passports in order to go there. The journey, which stretched from the Missouri River across two and a half thousand miles of wilderness, had only very rarely been attempted by any whites other than the hardiest mountain men.
Undeterred by any of these obstacles, in the spring of 1835 Marcus set off on his exploratory journey to the Rockies. At the time there was only one way for an easterner with no experience of traveling beyond the frontier to do this. Every year for the previous decade, the American Fur Company had sent a caravan of pack animals and supplies out West, from Saint Louis, Missouri, to an extraordinary trade fair, known as the Rendezvous, on the Green River in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Marcus was able to attach himself to the caravan, and thus travel in relative safety (although at first the mountain men resented his presence so much they threw rotten eggs at him). In July he attended the annual Rendezvous, and there he was able to meet with a number of Flathead and Nez Percé chiefs, who assured him of their interest in having missionaries among them. Perhaps more importantly, from Narcissa’s point of view, he also learned that the American Fur Company had succeeded in taking twenty heavily loaded wagons across the mountains. Wherever a wagon could go, he concluded, a woman could go too.
At this point, no one back East could possibly have known what Marcus’s findings were going to be. When Narcissa wrote her own letter of application to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, her supporting letters from local ministers contained enthusiastic but vague testimonials about her suitability “in instructing the heathen in the way to Heaven.” No one made any mention of the journey she would have to undertake, let alone the conditions she might face when she got there. Only one man, David Greene, the secretary of the ABCFM, expressed a momentary doubt: “Have you carefully ascertained & weighed the difficulties in the way of conducting females to those remote & desolate regions and comfortably sustaining families there?”7 His question remained unanswered. Religious conviction, and a burning desire to bring the word of God to the Native Tribes, was all that was required. The board accepted Narcissa’s application.
In December, Marcus returned east and set about recruiting a mission party to accompany the couple back to Oregon country the following March. In the absurdly little time that remained to them, there was one major hurdle still to be surmounted. The board had agreed to let the Whitmans go, so long as another missionary, who was also an ordained minister (which Marcus Whitman was not), could be found to accompany them.12 Of the various contenders who had expressed an interest in working among the western Tribes, only one emerged as even a remote possibility: Henry Spalding.
That Marcus should have even considered Henry Spalding—Narcissa’s rejected suitor—for the position is a measure of his desperation. It was the worst possible choice. Three years previously, Henry had finally met and married another woman, Eliza Hart, and in February 1836 the couple were already headed for their own mission among the Osage in western Missouri. With the board’s permission, Marcus rode after them to try to convince them to change their minds.
He finally met up with the Spaldings at the Howard Inn, New York. On February 14, Eliza recorded the meeting in her diary. “Today we met with Dr. Whitman who has been laboring for some time to obtain associates to accompany him west of the Rocky Mountains to establish a mission among the Nez Percés Indians,” she wrote. “He had failed in every other attempt to obtain someone to go out with him in the capacity of a minister, and if he did not succeed in getting Mr. Spalding to engage in this expedition, he should relinquish the idea of going out this season.”8 Despite Henry’s previous unhappy connection to Narcissa, the couple agreed.
On March 3, just two weeks later, when a newly married Narcissa Whitman finally bade farewell, for the last time, to all her family and friends before setting out on her journey, it would be not only with a husband she barely knew, but also with traveling companions who would have plenty of cause to resent her.
Eliza Spalding and Narcissa Whitman were, on the surface of things, very similar. Eliza had been born in 1807, in Connecticut, into a family of ancient pioneering stock. Her father has been described as “a plain, substantial farmer.”9 Like Narcissa, she was well educated and extremely devout, and, just as Narcissa had done, she had agreed to marry a man whom she knew only slightly in order to pursue her dream of becoming a missionary, and to “accompany a stranger, to a land of strangers.”10 But, despite all these outward appearances, the two women could not have been more different.
In his A History of Oregon, William Gray, who was to become a last-minute addition to the 1836 missionary expedition, gave this astute comparison of the two women. “Mrs. Whitman . . . was a lady of refined feelings and commanding appearance,” he wrote. “She had very light hair, light, fresh complexion and light blue eyes. At the time she arrived in the country in the prime of life, she was considered a fine, noble-looking woman, affable and free to converse with all she met.” Eliza Spalding, on the other hand, was “above the medium height, slender in form with coarse features, dark brown hair, blue eyes, rather dark complexion, coarse voice, of a serious turn of mind, and quick in understanding language. In fact, she was remarkable in acquiring the Nez Percé language . . . And had been taught, while young, all the useful branches of domestic life; could spin, weave, and sew, etc; could prepare an excellent meal at short notice, and was generally sociable, but not forward in conversation with or in attentions to gentlemen. In this particular she was the opposite of Mrs. Whitman. With the native women, Mrs. Spalding always appeared easy and cheerful. . . . She was considered by the Indian men as a brave, fearless woman, and was respected and esteemed by all.”11 It was clear to him (and perhaps, in her heart of hearts, to Narcissa too) that, while completely lacking in Narcissa’s outward polish and charm, it was skinny, mousy, linguistically and spiritually gifted Eliza Spalding who was the better equipped in every way to succeed as a missionary.
The two women first met while still en route to the frontier, in Cincinnati, on March 17. While their relationship was always outwardly cordial, none of the camaraderie that should have sprung up between the women—and which would become so important a part of the experience of later women settlers—seems ever to have existed between them. Instead, an underlying tension, not to say rivalry, is hinted at from the very outset.
The mission party that finally assembled at Liberty, Missouri, from where their overland journey by horse and wagon would begin, was composed of ten people: the Whitmans, the Spaldings, William Gray,13 two helpers,14 and three Nez Percé: “Richard” Takahtooahtis and “John” Aits, who had traveled back East with Marcus Whitman in 1835 in order to attend school and learn English, and a third man, Samuel Temoni. Between them they also purchased a heavy farm wagon, twelve horses, six mules, and seventeen head of cattle. They carried with them a single, communal, homemade tent that the women had somehow constructed between them out of bed ticking, some rubber cloths for use as ground sheets, and a supply of blankets. In Rushville, Narcissa had had a pair of gentleman’s boots made for her, “in brother Augustus’s shoe store,” and all took India-rubber life preservers with them, “so that if we fall into the water we shall not drown.” In addition, each of them had a plate, a knife and fork, and a tin cup. It was almost unbelievably rudimentary.
Despite the fact that during the first six weeks the party had to travel hard to catch up with the American Fur Company caravan (which they had just missed when it left Saint Louis on March 29), at first the journey had an almost holiday feel to it—for Narcissa at least. As it would be for all settlers, this was the easiest stage of the journey: almost a thousand miles of gently rolling, rippling prairie grassland, following the winding course of the Platte River. “I think I may say easier traveling here than on any turnpike in the [States],” she wrote. Under these conditions, the fresh air and vigorous daily exercise—the women could be in their saddles for up to thirty miles a day—did her nothing but good. Narcissa thrived. Her health, she wrote ebulliently, had never been better. While all the others had been feeling the effects of drinking river water, “I am an exception however,” she noted with pride.
Not only was Narcissa enjoying the freedom of the outdoor life; she was also getting to know her husband for the first time.15 “I have such a good place to shelter, under my husband’s wings. He is so excellent. I love to confide in his judgement and act under him,” she wrote to her sister. “Jane, if you want to be happy, get a good husband as I have got and be a missionary.”
Perhaps because she was so absorbed in what was, to all intents and purposes, her honeymoon, it would be three whole weeks from their first meeting before Narcissa made any reference to Eliza at all. Immediately, she was making comparisons between them—not all of them flattering to Mrs. Spalding.
“I think I shall endure the journey well, perhaps better than any of the rest of us,” she wrote to her family on April 7. “Mrs. Spalding does not look nor feel quite healthy enough for our enterprise. Riding affects her differently from what it does me. Everyone who sees me compliments me as being the best able to endure the journey over the mountains from my looks.” Having established her superior credentials as a traveler, Narcissa could then afford to be a little more gracious. “Sister S[palding] is very resolute,” she wrote, “no shrinking with her. She possesses good fortitude. I like her very much. She wears well upon acquaintance,” she concluded, adding (perhaps just a touch condescendingly), “She is a very suitable person for Mr. Spalding, has the right temperament to match him. I think we shall get along very well together; we have so far.”12 Eliza Spalding, on the other hand, does not mention Narcissa at all.
Toward the end of May, the missionary party finally caught up with the American Fur Company caravan, with whom the missionaries would be traveling as far as the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, just as Marcus had done the previous year. “The Fur Com[pany] is large this year,” Narcissa wrote. “We are really a moving village—nearly four hundred animals with ours, mostly mules, and seventy men.”16 Soon, their days settled into a familiar routine. For her family’s benefit, Narcissa went on to describe a typical day. On June 3, she wrote: “In the morn as soon as the day breaks the first that we hear is the word—arise, arise. Then the mules set up such a noise as you never heard which puts the whole camp in motion. We encamp in a large ring: baggage and men, tents and waggons on the outside and all the animals, except the cows [which] are fastened to pickets within the circle. . . . While the horses are feeding, we get our breakfast in a hurry and eat it. By this time the word ‘Catch up, catch up’ rings through the camp for moving. We are ready to start usually at six—travel till eleven, encamp, rest and feed, start again about two—travel until six . . . then encamp for the night.”
It was also a surprisingly sociable time, and some interesting niceties were observed. In addition to the Fur Company employees, a number of independent gentlemen had attached themselves to the party, including the wealthy Scots aristocrat and sportsman William Drummond Stuart and the mountain man Moses “Black” Harris.17 Invitations—sometimes to take tea, at other times to dine—were offered, and then politely returned, between the various camps.
Even though they were now many hundreds of miles away from “civilization,” food was always in good supply. The Fur Company kept a man on permanent guard to hunt for the camp, and soon they were eating fresh buffalo meat every day. Initially, Narcissa enjoyed this diet very much. “I never saw anything like buffalo meat to satisfy hunger. We do not want anything else with it. . . . I relish it well, and it agrees with me, my health is excellent, so long as I have buffalo meat I do not wish anything else.” Not so Eliza Spalding. “Sister S is affected by it considerably and has been quite sick,” Narcissa added.
By June they had reached Fort Laramie, a fur trading post on the confluence of the North Platte and Laramie Rivers.18 Here they rested up, and a week later began the ascent up into the Rocky Mountains, crossing the Continental Divide at South Pass. On July 6, after three months and thirteen hundred miles of hard traveling, they rode into the Rendezvous at last.
From its beginning in 1825 all the way until its end in 1840, the Rendezvous was an extraordinary event, surely one of the largest and most fantastic spectacles in all the American West. For two weeks every year, as many as four hundred fur trappers, many of them with their Native American wives and children, came together at a pre-appointed spot on the banks of the Green River to await the arrival of the caravan.19 For these mountain men, the Rendezvous was not only an opportunity to sell the animal furs they had been collecting all year—beaver, buffalo, marten and mink, otter, skunk, muskrat and badger—and exchange them for much-needed supplies from Saint Louis, it was also the great social occasion of the year: a wild, two-week-long fiesta in which men who throughout the whole of the preceding year had been living a bitterly hard, cold, and often solitary life in the wilderness could meet their friends and drink, carouse, gamble, and race horses to their hearts’ content.
The mountain men were not the only ones present. Several thousand Native Americans—Shoshone, Bannock, Nez Percé, Flathead, and Cayuse—also congregated there. Men, women, and children, together with their dogs pulling heavily laden travaux, and as many as ten thousand of their horses and mules, poured every year into the remote mountain valley. Almost overnight, a vast tented city would spring up: hundreds upon hundreds of lodges stretching for as many as six miles on either side of the Green River, their white hides glinting in the sun. Woodsmoke from a thousand campfires filled the air and, from the camps of the mountain men, the sweet strains of their fiddles and violins.
The arrival of Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding at the Rendezvous on July 6, 1836, caused a sensation. “The American Fur Company caravan, was accompanied by Doctor Marcus Whitman, and lady, Mr. H. H. Spalding and lady, and Mr. W. H. Gray . . . on their way to [Oregon] to establish a mission among the Indians in that quarter,” recorded one of the mountain men who was present at the gathering that day. “The two ladies were gazed on with wonder and astonishment by the rude savages,” he wrote, “they being the first white women ever seen by these Indians, and the first that had ever penetrated into these wild and rocky regions.”20 13
Although neither of the two women left a wider description of the Rendezvous, both wrote accounts of their first moments in the tented city. Hundreds of mounted warriors “carrying their war weapons, bearing their war emblems and . . . implements of music . . . skins drawn over hoops with rattles and trinkets to make a noise”14 circled around them. When this display came to a halt, the two women found themselves in the middle of a fascinated crowd of Nez Percé, Flatheads, and Cayuse.
The women and children, in particular, flocked to look at them. “The women were not satisfied short of saluting Mrs. W. and myself with a kiss,” Eliza wrote. “All appear happy to see us. If permitted to reach their country and locate among them,” she added, “may our labors be blest to their temporal and spiritual good.”15 Narcissa, too, was almost overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome they received. The women’s kisses, in particular, were “unexpected, and affected me very much,” she wrote. “After we had been seated a while in the midst of the gazing throng, one of the Chiefs . . . came with his wife and very politely introduced us. They say they all like us and that we have come to live among them.”
The missionary party remained at the Rendezvous for almost two weeks. During this time, each woman would do what came naturally to her. Eliza Spalding, although she was still “quite feeble” (she was suffering from digestive problems which she believed were due to an excess of buffalo meat in her diet) and was often confined to her bed, nonetheless spent as much of her time as she could among the women, with whom “she seemed to be a great favorite.”16 Narcissa, on the other hand, who had no such natural affinity, spent much of her time giving out Bibles to the mountain men and being regaled with stories of their daring exploits. As William Gray would later record: “All the refined education and manners of the daughter of Judge Prentiss, of Prattsburgh . . . found abundant opportunity to exhibit the cardinal ornaments of a religious and civilized society.”17
The Spaldings and the Whitmans finally left the Rendezvous at Horse Creek on July 18. Having come thus far under the protection of the American Fur Company, they now joined a delegation from the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company, under the command of John L. McLeod and Thomas McKay, who were traveling back to the company’s headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. For the missionaries, more than six hundred miles of hard traveling still lay ahead of them before they reached their destination at Fort Walla Walla, on the Columbia. Although this would be the shortest leg of their marathon journey, it would take them across terrain that was more rugged and mountainous than any of them had yet experienced.
To their dismay, the relatively easy two marches they had been used to, broken by a two-hour break in the middle of the day to eat and rest, was now replaced by one long march which sometimes lasted for as much as eight hours at a stretch. For the two women—particularly Eliza, who remained wretchedly ill—it was a punishing regime. They were also now obliged to break one of their most dearly held religious practices, which was to observe the Sabbath day of rest.
The unalleviated diet of buffalo meat, which Narcissa had once thought so delicious, was starting to pall, and her usually excellent digestion was beginning to suffer. During the long days in the saddle, she dreamed “as a hungry child would” of her mother’s bread and butter. “I fancy pork and potatoes would relish extremely well. Have been living on fresh meat for two months exclusively. Am cloyed with it,” she wrote in her diary. “I do not know how I shall endure this part of the journey.”
Their route became more demanding by the day. “Very mountainous,” she wrote on July 25. “Paths winding on the sides of steep mountains. In some places the path is so narrow as scarcely to afford room for the animal to place his foot. One after another, we pass along with cautious steps.”
It was now almost five months since Marcus and Narcissa had left home, and they had been traveling rough with the Spaldings for four of them. The heat, even in the mountains, was “oppressive.” Tempers were becoming increasingly frayed.
There were tensions between Narcissa and Marcus too. The wagon that the doctor had insisted on bringing from the Rendezvous, against all advice to the contrary, was becoming more of an impediment by the day. “Husband has had a tedious time with the waggon today. 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 waggon was upset twice. Did not wonder at this at all,” she wrote with unaccustomed sharpness. “It was a great wonder that it was not turning a somersault continually.”
With another six weeks of “steady journeying” ahead of them, there was nothing for it but to endure. “Long for rest, but must not murmur.” Food was becoming something of an obsession. Occasionally, along the sides of creeks they came across patches of wild berries—gooseberries; serviceberries, a kind of soft fruit that is common to Idaho, “very sweet and something like the Pear in its flavor”; and hawthorn berries, “as large as a cherry & taste much like a mealy sweet apple”—and sometimes they were able to catch fish, but in the main their diet still consisted almost entirely of buffalo meat. Soon, this was reduced to buffalo jerky, so sour, moldy, and “full of all manner of filth” that the party agreed they would not even have fed it to a dog. “I can scarcely eat it, it appears so filthy,” Narcissa wrote, “but it will keep us alive, and we ought to be thankful for it.”
They were out of the mountains now, and for several days had been riding along the dreary desert flats in what is now southern Idaho. Here they found “rocks and sandy plains covered with a species of wormwood called sage, of a pale green, offensive both to the sight and smell.” The heat here was even more oppressive than it had been in the mountains.
Just a few days later they were in sight of Fort Hall, on the south side of the Snake River.21 As with the other trading posts that the missionaries would pass on their journey—Fort Laramie and, later, Fort Snake—there was nothing particularly fortress-like about Fort Hall: a simple stockade of cottonwood logs, sixty feet square, within which there were some rudimentary living quarters and a storage space for furs. Despite this, both women were overjoyed by the sight of it: “Anything like a house makes us glad.” They were even more cheered by the commander Captain Thring’s invitation to dine with him, “the cool retreat of an upper room,” “stools to sit on,” and even a garden to walk in, in the cool of the evening.
On August 13 they forded the Snake River. Two of the tallest horses were selected for the women, but even so they had to wade against the current for half a mile or more upstream, “which made it hard for the horses the water being up to their sides.” But by this time Narcissa was almost blasé about it. “I once thought that crossing streams would be the most dreadful part of the journey. I can now cross the most difficult stream without the least fear.”
The same could not be said for the wagon. “Both the cart and the mules were capsized in the water and the mules entangled in the harness. The mules would have drowned, but for a desperate struggle to get them ashore.” It was only by putting two of the strongest horses in front of the cart, and having two men swim behind to steady it, that they eventually succeeded.
Marcus now decided to lighten it as much as possible, obliging Narcissa to leave one of her trunks behind. In what would soon become a common refrain among settlers traveling west, all four were regretting having brought so much luggage. “It would have been better for us not to have attempted to bring any luggage whatever, only what [was] necessary to use on the way. If I were to make this journey again, I would make quite different preparations,” Narcissa wrote. “To pack & unpack so many times & cross so many streams, where the packs frequently get wet, requires no small amount of labor, besides the injury done to the articles. Our books, what few we have, have been wet several times. . . . The custom of the country is to possess nothing & then you will loose nothing, while traveling.”
By August 19 they had arrived at Fort Snake, which had been built, and was still owned, by Mr. McKay, one of the commanders of the Hudson’s Bay caravan.22 Here, once again, they were able to rest up for a few days, and to wash their clothes. “This is the third time I have washed since I left the States, or home either,” Narcissa wrote. On the twenty-second, they set off on the last leg of their journey, to the Hudson’s Bay Company fort at Walla Walla. “As for the waggon it is left at the fort, & I have nothing to say about crossing it this time,” Narcissa wrote wearily. “Our animals were failing & the route in crossing the Blue Mountains is said to be impassable for it. . . . We regret now to loose the use of it when we have been at so much labor in getting it this far,” but it could no longer be helped.
As well as parting company with the wagon, the Whitmans would now part company, albeit temporarily, with the Spaldings. It was agreed that Eliza and Henry, guided by one of the Nez Percé chiefs, would travel on slowly with the mules and the luggage, leaving Marcus and Narcissa to travel on at a quicker pace through the mountains with Mr. McLeod. While this was presented as a practical arrangement, the truth was that the couples needed a break from one another. Although none of the four referred to it at the time, serious personality clashes, particularly between Henry and Narcissa, would later come to light.18
If Mrs. Whitman was experiencing any doubts about the wisdom of casting in her lot with the Spaldings, for the time being she kept them to herself. “I never wished to go back. Such a thought finds no place in my heart,” she wrote on August 27. “ ‘The Lord is better to us than our fears.’ I always find it so.”
It was, in any case, far too late for regrets. Both couples, although traveling apart, now faced the most physically challenging part of their journey. After crossing the Wallowa Mountains, the trail took them through the Grande Ronde Valley and then, finally, toward the end of August, they began their ascent of the Blue Mountains.
At first the thickly forested landscape they rode through appeared to Narcissa like nothing so much as “the hills in my native county . . . Indeed, I do not know as I was ever so much affected with any scenery in my life. The singing of the birds, the echo of the voices of my fellow travelers, as they were scattered through the woods, all had a strong resemblance to bygone days.” But these nostalgic reveries did not last. “Before noon we began to descend one of the most terrible mountains for steepness & length I have yet seen. It was like winding stairs in its descent & 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. We had no sooner gained the foot of the mountain when another more steep and dreadful was before us.”
That same evening they reached “the highest elevation,” and just as they began yet another descent they were rewarded with an extraordinary view. There before them lay the Columbia River Valley in its entirety—two hundred miles of eastern Oregon spread out before them like a map. “Beyond the valley we could see two distant Mountains, Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens. These lofty peaks were of a conical form & separate from each other by a considerable distance. Behind the former the Sun was hiding part of his rays which gave us a more distinct view of this gigantic cone. The beauty of this extensive valley contrasted well with the rolling mountains behind us & at this hour of twilight was enchanting & quite diverted my mind from the fatigue under which I was laboring.” Narcissa was at that moment looking down upon the only place she would ever again call home.
By the end of August the Whitmans were within days of reaching their destination. It was an extraordinarily intense time. While during the previous few days Narcissa had felt “weak, restless and scarcely able to sit on my horse,” now, suddenly, she experienced a surge of adrenaline-fueled energy. “This morn my feelings were a little peculiar,” she wrote to her mother. “Felt remarkably well and strong, so much as to mention it, but could not see any reason why I should feel any more rested than on the previous morn. Then when I began to see what a day’s ride was before me, I understood it. If I had no better health today than yesterday, I should have fainted under it.”
But they were not quite there yet. The custom of the country was to send “heralds” to the fort, to announce the party’s imminent arrival, and to give the officials there time to prepare a suitable reception. As they waited, Narcissa described the strange calm that descended on their camp. “Our employment this afternoon is various. Some are washing their shirts & some are cutting their [hair] others shaving, preparing to see Walla Walla, and some are asleep. For my part I endeavored to divert myself the best way I could, doing a little mending for Husband, & trying to write while he & Mr. Gray are stretched upon the ground enjoying the refreshment of a sound sleep.”
On September 1, the great day had finally arrived. “You can better imagine our feelings this morning than I can describe them,” Narcissa wrote. “I could not realize that the end of our long journey was so near. We arose as soon as it was light, took our cup of coffee and ate of the duck we had given us last night, then dressed for Walla W. We started while it was yet early, for all were in haste to reach the desired haven. If you could have seen us now you would have been surprised, for both man & beast galloped almost all the way to the Fort.”
There was, at first, almost too much to take in. “The door yard was filled with hens, turkeys, pigeons & in another place we saw cows, hogs & goats in abundance & I think the fattest cattle & swine I ever saw.” And after five months’ hard traveling, during which they had subsisted almost entirely on buffalo meat, Narcissa can be forgiven for her almost obsessive recording of what they were given to eat. For breakfast, to which they sat down almost immediately upon arrival, they were given “fresh salmon, potatoes, tea, bread and butter,” followed by a dinner at four o’clock of “pork, potatoes, beets, cabbage, turnips, tea, bread & butter, my favorite dinner, and much like the last dinner I ate with Mother Loomis [her mother-in-law].” In between they were also treated to “a feast of mellons,” which were the very “finest I think I ever saw or tasted.”
The room she was given at the Fort had portholes instead of windows and was filled with a small arsenal of firearms, as well as a large cannon which was kept always loaded, but she was by now quite hardened to this kind of thing. “I am so well pleased with the possession of a room to shelter us from the scorching sun, that I scarcely notice them.”
There was one particular detail that she did notice, however. “While at breakfast . . . a young cock placed himself upon the sill of the door and crowed. Now whether it was the sight of the first white females or out of compliment to the company I know not . . . [but] I was pleased with his appearance. You may think me simple for speaking of such a small circumstance as this. No one knows the feelings occasioned by seeing objects once familiar after a long deprivation, especially when it is heightened by the expectation of not meeting with them.”
Had she but known it, the sound of a cockerel crow, with its hint of betrayal and death, was a presage of things to come.