After a winter campaign of great hardship and many months of dickering, some Cayuses were hanged in Oregon City for the murder of the Whitmans. There seems doubt—as there was always doubt at Indian executions— whether these were really the guilty ones. Ironically enough it was the Catholic fathers who attended them to the scaffold.
The success of the Catholic missionaries among the Indians would seem to have been a matter of psychological understanding of the Indian nature. Priests were credited with such utterances as “Noise is essential to the Indian’s enjoyment” and “Without singing the best instruction is of little value.” A Catholic priest invented the Catholic ladder, a diagram of the mysteries of the church presented in simple chronological order by which the competitive red man could measure his advance in piety. On special occasions like Easter the Indian was allowed to express his pleasure in his adopted white deity after his own fashion, and did so with green boughs, plumes, drums, bells, and occasional counterpoint of piercing yells.
The Catholic insistence on the objectifying of the mysteries undoubtedly made a deep appeal to the Indian with his worship not only of the Great Power but of lesser powers—any object which carried a quality of the supernatural. A Catholic missionary in the early days reported finding in one Indian tribe, in the high arid lands to the east, a spotted calico shirt and a white robe. These sacred objects had been obtained from a white man whom the Indians had seen wearing the garments, which they took to be respectively the manitou of the spotted disease (smallpox) which had killed such alarming numbers of them, and the manitou of the snow. Possession of these rare objects was obtained by the barter of a number of their best horses, and for many years the sacred articles were carried to the place of ritual and there worshipped with the smoking of the great medicine pipe— an offering to earth, sun, and water—and with appropriate dancing and singing. By this worship the Indians hoped to prevent the return of the disease and to bring a snow heavy enough to push the buffalo down from the mountains.
The Indians liked instances of the intervention of the white man’s Higher Spirit in matters of daily life; and the successful crossing of the Columbia bar in a great storm in the forties gave the priest and six nuns aboard the vessel a special distinction as bearers of magic power.
The early Catholic fathers were often men of cultivation and remarkable strength of character. Among them the names of Blanchet and de Smet stand first. Both men endured untold hardships with great courage and vigor. Both made trips to Europe to arouse interest in this remote part of the world and brought back bands of nuns and priests for the new field. Of de Smet it is said that his travels, at a time in history when travel entailed nothing but endurance, totaled from seven to nine times round the earth. He crossed the Atlantic nineteen times, made one trip round the Horn and two by way of Panama. He once fasted thirty days before taking a sixty-mile snowshoe trip for which he needed to reduce his weight, and when threatened by a hostile Indian was able to knock the weapon from his hand, throw him, and give him a sound beating with a riding whip, which summary treatment brought the Indian as a convert to the church.
De Smet was also a man of delicate sensibilities, particularly susceptible to the charms of nature and able to express his feeling for it in such phrases as “the rock-hung flower” and, with reference to his own desert home in the drylands of this territory, “a little Arabia shut in by stern Heaven-built walls of rock.” Although he mourned the Indians’ inability to discard their superstitions he is himself reported to have considered a severe illness the punishment for his “too carnal admiration of nature.”
Although the old missions have sunk into ruins, the few descriptions that remain of these oases of garden and brook in the midst of a wild uncultivated country convey a slumbrous charm. In the correspondence of the wife of General Stevens, the first governor of the Territory of Washington, there is such a description of the mission St. Joseph d’Olympia:
“I also had a boat built in which I made excursions down the Sound. About two miles down there was a Catholic mission, a large dark house or monastery, surrounded by cultivated land, a fine garden in front filled with flowers, bordered on one side, next the water, with immense bushes of wall flowers in bloom; the fragrance resembling the sweet English violet, filling the air with its delicious odor. Father Ricard, the venerable head of this house, was from Paris. He had lived in this place more than twenty years. He had with him Father Blanchet, a short thickset man, who managed everything pertaining to the temporal comfort of the mission. Under him were servants who were employed in various ways, baking, cooking, digging and planting. Their fruit was excellent and a great rarity, as there was but one more orchard in the whole country. There was a large number of Flatheads settled about them, who had been taught to count their beads, say prayers, and were good Catholics in all outward observances; chanted the morning and evening prayers, which they sang in their own language in a low, sweet strain, which, the first time I heard it, sitting in my boat at sunset, was impressive and solemn. We went often to visit Father Ricard, who was a highly educated man, who seemed to enjoy having some one to converse with in his own language. He said the Canadians used such bad French.”
There is something haunting about the thought of the governor’s lady, a homesick New England gentlewoman, floating with her Indian paddler on the waters of Puget Sound at sunset, in the sight of the eternal snowcaps and the high densely wooded hills, listening to the Flatheads chanting the hymns of the Catholic church under the leadership of a cultivated French priest.
This mission was last used by a family of Olympia pioneers who spent a winter in the seventies within its moldering walls. The family remembered it chiefly for its gloom, the fact that the walls had few windows and those built high because of the priests’ wish not to have the Indians distracted by the outside world when at their prayers; and also to make it difficult for arrows or stray missiles to find their way inside.
HOMEMAKERS
In the 1840s emigrant wagon trains began to unfurl their white sails on the prairies of the Middle West and start their laborious creaking way westward. Occasionally descendants of these hardy folk insist that Grandma said it was all just one long picnic; but this seems a little hard to believe. A Pendleton newspaperwoman who rode in a prairie schooner from La Grande to Pendleton with a group of “pioneers” in the year 1938 assured me that the torture of the movement even on a paved road was almost more than she could bear for two days.
Getting wagons into the last reaches of this new country was an achievement, first attempted by Marcus Whitman who persisted in taking on a wagon from Fort Hall against the expert advice of fur traders. He actually succeeded in getting it as far west as Fort Boise, but he could hardly have imagined what a tide of emigration was to follow in its wake. By the time the tide was at its full Marcus Whitman was dead of an Indian tomahawk.
Through three decades and well into the fourth people crossed the plains into Oregon. The story of their travels makes an oft-repeated but still compelling saga of heroism in the face of Indian massacres, cholera epidemics, dried-up water holes, one day stopovers for women to give birth. It is not easy to determine what brought these beglamored people into the vast western unknown. Certainly there were plenty of stay-at-homes to call them insane when they did it.
But there were other men whose enthusiasm more than made up for the skepticism of their fellows. As far back as 1822 attention had been drawn to the Oregon country by John Floyd of Virginia who, in the House of Representatives, made a report on American rights in the distant lands west of the Rockies and hinted that colonization there was bound to take place. Mr. Bailies of Massachusetts envisioned a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific which would prevent the eventual colonies in this territory from breaking away into an independent unit and setting up a government of their own. Mr. Bailies, who enjoyed a good rich phrase with the best of his contemporaries, said that he would “delight to know that in this desolate spot, where the prowling cannibal now lurks in the forest, hung round with human bones and with human scalps, the temples of justice and the temples of God were reared, and man made sensible of the beneficent intentions of his creator.”
Oregon bills kept coming up in Congress throughout the twenties while the first diplomatic dickerings over British versus American rights to the North Pacific coast began to take place in London. In 1829 Hall J.