Caught Up in Circumstances
by Dale L. Walker

In all the history of the Old American West no year opened and closed with such brutal tragedy as 1847.

The year began with a calamity in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range, where, by the time a rescue party reached them, nearly half of the 87 men, women, and children of the Donner-Reed wagon train lay dead in the snowdrifts of Truckee Pass. The "Donner Party" and its stories of starvation, insanity, cannibalism, and the indomitable will to live, became a reminder of the horrors, as well as the triumphs, of the overland trails to California and Oregon.

Of less notoriety but nearly as heart-rending as the fate of the Donner and Reed families was a tale that reached its climax on Nov. 29, 1847, at an isolated Christian mission near present-day Walla Walla, Wash.

The mission site was called Waiilatpu, "Place of the Rye Grass," in the language of the native people it served. These were the Cayuse, a small tribe associated with the Nez Perce and Umatilla of the Pacific Northwest, and it was the Cayuse who became the chosen wards of two devoted missionaries, Narcissa and Marcus Whitman.

Born into a devoutly religious family in Prattsburgh, N.Y., in 1808, Narcissa Prentiss became certain at age 16 that Providence has chosen her for missionary work. "I frequently desired to go to the heathen," she wrote to the American Board of Foreign Missions.

She was teaching school in Amity, N.Y., when she heard a visiting preacher speak of the need for missionaries among the Indian tribes in the untamed West and she inquired of the Mission Board in December, 1834, if single women were acceptable. They were not but her prayers were answered when she became engaged to Marcus Whitman, a country physician from Rushville, N.Y., with a similar passion for service among the "heathen."

The two married early in 1836 and with the Board's sanction headed West with another church couple, Henry Spalding and his wife Eliza. With a small train of wagons they traveled from St. Louis guided by trappers of the American Fur Company. (En route, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding became the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains.)

The party reached the Walla Walla River on Sept. 1, 1836, and at Waiilatpu the Whitmans decided to open a mission to serve the Cayuse tribe while the Spaldings traveled on to Lapwai, in present-day western Idaho, to work among the Nez Perce people.

For the first three years of her labors at Waiilatpu, Narcissa was optimistic that the mission would be successful. She learned the native tongue and helped Marcus in the construction of the mission buildings and grist mill and in his medical work among the Cayuse. She opened the mission school, taught English and Christian religious studies, and assisted Marcus in Sabbath services.

She had become pregnant on the journey to Oregon and on March 14, 1837 (Narcissa's own 29th birthday), gave birth to Alice Clarissa, "a treasure invaluable," she wrote to her mother. The baby drew many Indian visitors to the Whitman home but her joy was short-lived. In June, 1839, little Alice drowned in the Walla Walla River. The child's death tested Narcissa's faith and for months the normally buoyant woman, who loved to sing and dance, isolated herself, spending days in her room seeking comfort by writing to her family.

While Marcus was an attentive and devoted husband, his medical work often took him away for long periods from the mission and from Narcissa's growing melancholia. Her optimism began fading. The Cayuse, who, she wrote home, "had been serving the devil faithfully" until she and Marcus arrived among them, were resistant to their Christian messages. This was made worse by the Whitmans' scorn of Cayuse traditions. Narcissa wrote that the Indians were "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go...." She confided to her family that the natives sought the "Book of Heaven" as a source of white man's power rather than for its Christian inspiration, said that they were becoming truculent and threatening and had begun stealing horses and cattle, and produce from the mission gardens.

In 1842, the Mission Board announced it would close the Waiilatpu mission. While the services of the Whitmans were laudable, there were not enough converts to Christianity among the native people to continue the work among them. Marcus made his way east that winter and was able to convince the Board to reverse its decision, at least temporarily. He returned in the spring, helping lead what became known as the "Great Migration," a wagon train of one thousand pioneers moving westward on the Oregon Trail.

The Whitmans adopted eleven children of parents who had died on the journey to Oregon and found themselves devoting more time to helping the American settlers than helping the Cayuses of the Walla Walla Valley. Their mission house now served as a sort of white boarding school as Narcissa emerged from her state of depression to tend to the emigrant orphans.

The Indians were restless. The arrival of the wagon trains not only carried hundreds of white settlers into lands held for centuries by the Cayuse and other northwestern tribes, but the emigrants brought diseases with them, one of which barely affected the whites but proved fatal to the Indian.

As wagon after wagon rolled into Oregon in the fall and winter of 1847, a particularly virulent strain of measles became a scourge among the Oregon tribes, spreading across the territory and before it ran its course killing thousands of Oregon's Indians, including half of the Cayuse people.

While nothing could stop it, it became Marcus Whitman's fate to be the lone physician, and a white one, among a native populace plagued by a white man's disease. He ministered as best he could with his primitive bag of nostums, cold compresses, and prayers, but the efforts were futile. As quickly became clear to the Indian, the white people were not dying from the disease they called "measles"; only the Indians died of it.

At about two o'clock in the afternoon of Nov. 29, 1847, the Cayuse chief Tiloukaikt, a man named Tomahas, and some other tribesmen assaulted Whitman in the parlor of the mission house, striking the doctor on the head with a brass tomahawk, shooting him after he crumpled to the floor, and hacking at his face and head with their war-axes.

Soon afterward, Narcissa was shot down by a young Cayuse named "Frank" Escaloom, the bullet striking her under her left arm. She fell but staggered up, helped by the others to a seat while she prayed to God to protect the children. Minutes later she was placed on a bed, her blood soaking the blankets. No attempt was made to move Marcus, who lay unconscious on the settee and soon died of his wounds.

After a heated debate, the Cayuse leaders decided to spare the children and all the women except Narcissa, blamed for encouraging the white settlers who brought the fatal disease to Waiilatpu. She was carried outside the mission house on a settee and was shot to death, her lifeless body lashed with a whip, her corpse dumped into an irrigation ditch.

At the end of the massacre, twelve other whites, including a few women and children, had been killed and the mission buildings burned to their foundations.

News of the Whitmans' deaths resulted in the short-lived "Cayuse War" in which a force of more than 500 militiamen, supported by the U.S. Army, marched against the tribe and other native inhabitants of central Oregon. After several weeks, 53 women and children held captive by the Cayuse were released and two years after the attack, several of those involved in the massacre surrendered. Chief Tiloukaikt was defiant to the end, announcing on the gallows on June 3, 1850, "Did not your missionaries teach us that Christ died to save his people? So we die to save our people."

The massacre and reprisals helped the passage of a Congressional bill in 1848 that made Oregon a formal U.S. Territory. The Whitman Mission National Historic Site, including the original mission site, mass grave, memorial obelisk, Visitor Center and a museum, are open all year. The park is located in southeastern Washington, off of Highway 12, seven miles west of Walla Walla.

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