Everyone went to Vancouver in those days, since the Hudson’s Bay Post was the one great supply center, and Lee was no exception. McLoughlin, looking favorably on missionary enterprise, persuaded Lee to remain on the western side of the Cascades. It was not long before Lee envisioned the future of this fertile untouched land, and saw the need for American settlers. Indeed, the early missionary nucleus has been accused of emphasizing the earthly promise of the new territory rather than the celestial promise which they were supposed to hold out to the Indians.
McLoughlin encouraged the American missionaries presumably because they were allies, standing also firmly for law and order, discipline, and obedience among the Indians. England sent out a Reverend Herbert Beaver (“very appropriate name for the fur trade,” as Peter Skene Ogden remarked) to the Vancouver settlement, but he and McLoughlin never got on well. The Reverend Beaver could not bring himself to accept the marriage of white men and Indian women; wrote tattletale letters to the Aborigines Protection Society of London; and in general made himself such a nuisance to McLoughlin that the chief factor gave him a spontaneous caning in the courtyard one day. The caning was the impulsive result of the Reverend Beaver’s reply to the doctor’s question as to why he was sending such unflattering reports to London: “Sir, if you wish to know why a cow’s tail grows downward I cannot tell you; I can only cite the fact.”
While the Methodist mission was beginning to flourish in the Willamette Valley, the Presbyterians sent one Dr. Samuel Parker to study the spiritual needs of the American Indian. With him came a religious-minded young physician, Dr. Marcus Whitman, a name destined to dominate in human interest all other names in the field of pioneer missionaries due to the tragedy which overtook this young man and his beautiful wife. They were killed by the Indians, along with a number of children, invalids, workers, and settlers near the mission they had established at Waiilatpu.
The dramatic episode of their death is not wholly accountable for the exalted status of the Whitmans in the Northwest pioneer pantheon. Many disputants have argued about the aims and importance of Whitman’s famous “ride” to the East coast in the winter of 1842 and ’43. Some say the trip was made only because he wished to save his mission from the threat of discontinuance. Others argue that he “saved Oregon” by going to Washington to see President Tyler and Secretary of State Daniel Webster and persuading them of this outpost’s eventual importance to the union. It is certain that he did outline a plan for establishing supply stations along the emigrant trail and submit it to the War Department where it was discovered in the files some forty years later.
In spite of the overwriting and the bitter arguments of which they have been the subject, the Whitmans still have a heart-touching appeal: the delicately nurtured Narcissa, dying so terribly in the wilderness; the impulsive and perhaps even foolhardy but certainly conscientious Marcus, bringing on himself and his wife and companions an ill-merited dark fate. Everything conspired against these good people. An epidemic of measles killed off many of the Indians, who laid the blame at the doctor’s door. The effects of a simple purgative inserted in watermelons to prevent stealing were of no help either. Moreover the Indians did not care for the untheatric ritual of the Presbyterians and longed to have the more colorful rites of the Catholic Church. Even after the massacre such a homely incident as an Indian’s overeating of dried peach pie in the mission kitchen among the survivors, almost occasioned fresh tragedy; the acute nature of the stomachache leading the greedy red man to conclude that he had been poisoned.
A moving account has survived of those last dark days at the mission at Waiilatpu, told by Catherine Sager who was thirteen at the time, a cripple who had fallen under a wagon wheel while crossing the plains. After months of physical agony and tragedy—both her parents died on the journey—she had been adopted into the Whitman home along with her six brothers and sisters. This eyewitness has told how Whitman was tomahawked from behind as he sat in the kitchen; how Mrs. Whitman, already wounded, was carried out of the house on a settee, only to be shot to death in the yard.
Mrs. Whitman, warned by her husband of the seriousness of the situation, leaving her supper untouched the night before the massacre, and going away by herself to weep where no one could see her, becomes to the reader a prototype of all pioneer women in hostile country accepting their fate with resignation. One thinks of the words she wrote as a bride on the way out to Oregon, when they came to the beautiful Grande Ronde country: “This morning lingered with Husband on the top of the hill that overlooks Grand Round for berries—always enjoy riding alone with him especially when we talk about home friends. It is then the tedious hours are sweetly decoyed away.” And again when they are debating the possibility of taking the seven orphaned Sagers, including the five months, ill, undernourished youngest, she thinks perhaps of her own child drowned when very small: “Husband thought we could get along with all but the baby—he did not see how we could take that, but I felt that if I must take any I wanted her as a chain to bind the rest to me.” . . . And now it is night and she and her husband are both dead. The little thirteen-year-old adopted Sager is left to tell the rest of the story:
“I had always been very much afraid of the dark, but now I felt that the darkness was a protection to us, and I prayed that it might always remain so. I dreaded the coming of the daylight; . . . I heard the cats racing about and squalling. . . . I remember yet how terrible the striking of the clock sounded. Occasionally Mr. Kimball [a wounded man] would ask if I were asleep. . . .”
In the morning: “The children . . . renewed their calls for water. Day began to break, and Mr. K. told me to take a sheet off the bed and bind up his arm, and he would try and get them some. I arose stiff with cold, and with a dazed uncertain feeling . . . I said, ‘Mother [Mrs. Whitman] would not like to have the sheets torn up.’ Looking at me he said, ‘Child, don’t you know your mother is dead, and will never have any use for the sheets?’ I seemed to be dreaming . . . I took a sheet from the bed and tore off some strips, which, by his directions, I wound around his arm. He then told me to put a blanket around him, as he might faint on the way and not be able to get up, and would suffer from the cold. Taking a pair of blankets from the bed, I put them around him, tying them around the waist with a strip off the sheets. I then placed his hat on his head and he went downstairs. We waited long for him, but . . . we never saw him again alive.”
Later in the day, the Indians arrived and went off again and when the house seemed empty the children ventured downstairs. “The Indians had spread quilts over the corpses. Mary Ann, my sister, lifted the quilt from Dr. Whitman’s face, and said, ‘Oh girls, come and see father.’ We did so and saw a sight we will never forget.”
The final episodes of the Whitman story cover the captivity of the women and children, the killing of invalids in their beds. Girls of likely age were appropriated by the chiefs; one in particular, Lorinda Bewley, going down in history for her spirited resistance to her fate; a resistance, which, in the end, availed her little, except that two chiefs contended for the honor of having her; and while the Cayuse went off to get a wagon and rope to transport the fiery girl, a Umatilla came and took her away.
Down the years it is hard to realize the terrifying effect of the murder of the Whitmans at Waiilatpu on the Oregon settlers at that time. They were only a handful of people in an unfamiliar country; and they realized that if the miscreants went unpunished no isolated community would be safe in the future. Organizing an army, equipping it and outfitting it, was a very difficult task in 1847 in a country which was still loosely organized, without adequate supplies—where indeed “wheat and promises” were legal tender. Furthermore there was good reason to believe that their own government— the United States—was coolly indifferent to their fate. Nevertheless they dispatched Joe Meek, the hardy mountain man, overland from Oregon to the capital three thousand miles away to bear the news of the tragedy; an embassy under Jesse Applegate set out for California to ask help but had to turn back because of the impassable snows in the Siskiyous; there was no vessel going out to San Francisco all that winter; the only boat out of the Columbia