ON A CHILLY NOVEMBER MONDAY in 1847, a faction of the Cayuse tribe attacked missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and 11 other whites after measles had ravaged the tribe. It was a pivotal event in Northwest history. The Whitmans were long memorialized as martyrs. But the event's 150th anniversary will pass little noted this month - the result, historians say, of changing attitudes and difficulty looking at uncomfortable chapters in our history.
WALLA WALLA - Viola Forrest holds up a small black and white picture of a young woman robed in a long, shiny, 19th-century dress. Lace fringes her neckline and billows around her wrists. Frozen with an amused smile on her lips, she holds a Bible in her lap and gazes dreamily beyond the photographer.
"Can you believe it? Yes, that's me," she says with a laugh, staring at the print through her rose-tinted bifocals. "The whole pageant was just something not to miss."
It was 1936, the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in the Walla Walla Valley. More than 3,000 people took part in the pageant at the Walla Walla fairgrounds, a spectacular reenactment of what the program called a story of "heroic Christian soldiers and martyrs."
To the revelers, the Whitmans were benevolent pioneer heroes who braved a harsh continental crossing to bring Christianity to "uncivilized" Indians. They and 11 others died when Indians attacked their mission after measles had decimated the native community and after years of what later historians described as autocratic treatment by the white settlers.
Forrest, one of three who played Narcissa Whitman, remembers ox-drawn wagons and floats bearing parasol-toting "Pioneer Mothers" in a parade down Walla Walla's Main Street, all part of a grand commemoration that raised money to create a national historic site where the Whitman Mission once stood.
"This was before TV. There was a lot of pride in the community" said Forrest, now 80. "Marcus and Narcissa were valued highly."
The Whitmans are still memorialized in many ways - a college and a county are named for them, and there is a bronze statue of Marcus Whitman in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C., where each state is represented by one or more statues of honored residents.
But the aura of glory has faded sharply five decades later, in a time of greater respect for cultural differences.
This year, Nov. 29 will be the 150th anniversary of the attack at the Whitman mission. The anniversary will be observed quietly, if at all, in the Walla Walla community and Whitman College. At the Whitman Mission, National Park Service rangers stopped commemorating the date - and redesigned the displays - years ago.
Among whites, the Whitman legacy today elicits apathy, ambivalence and, some say, a willed amnesia. Among Indians, the story, as it was long depicted, left wounds that are still healing.
Second Great Awakening
Today, many modern historians view the tangle of cultural conflicts, misunderstandings, naivete and arrogance as an American tragedy - a tragedy that would be repeated with the westward expansion.
Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were both born in upstate New York and came of age in an era of evangelical religious revivalism called the Second Great Awakening. Narcissa Whitman converted in her teens and dedicated herself to saving sinful and "heathen" souls. Marcus Whitman, equally zealous, was a doctor who also organized temperance meetings in his town of Wheeler, N.Y.
The two married in 1836 and set out on an arduous journey for the Oregon country with another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding were the first white women to cross the Continental Divide.
The Whitmans established their mission among the Cayuse Indians in the Walla Walla Valley, while the Spaldings settled among the Nez Perce near Lewiston, Idaho.
Relations between the Whitmans and the Indians fluctuated between amicable tolerance and hostility. Marcus Whitman mainly tended to the sick, both Indians and whites. He had little luck persuading the Cayuse to relinquish their spiritual beliefs and not much more convincing them to give up hunting for farming.
Many of the Cayuse did not care for Marcus Whitman's rigid Christian morality, his fences and his encouragement of the white immigration that was depleting their supply of game and grazing land for their horses.
In 1847, with an outbreak of measles among the tribe and the settlers, fear swept among Cayuse who watched family members die from a disease against which they had no immunity. Some blamed the doctor who was unable to cure them.
On Nov. 29, 1847, a faction of Cayuse Indians seized the Whitman Mission, killing 13 people and taking 46 others captive for a month until they were ransomed for blankets, guns and tobacco.
It was a pivotal event in Northwest history. Known as the Whitman Massacre, it provoked anger and fear among white settlers, who clamored for the recognition of the Northwest as U.S. territory (originally the Oregon Territory) and the posting of federal troops to the region. Ensuing battles between white settlers and Indians eventually led to treaties that stripped the natives of much of their land and confined them to reservations.
"Un-PC in our world"
In the city of Walla Walla, a 9-foot bronze statue of Marcus Whitman stands on a small patch of green at the edge of downtown. It is visible from Main Street but hidden by a row of small shops to those traveling the boulevard that crosses the campus of Whitman College.
The obscured location seems fitting. At the liberal-arts college, whose sports teams are known as the Missionaries, feelings about the school's namesakes are complicated.
"I think the memory of Whitman is remote, other than that he was a pioneer," said Whitman College President Tom Cronin. "He did not have anything to do with the founding of the school as a college."
Marcus Whitman had been dead more than a decade before his colleague, Cushing Eells, established in his memory an elementary and secondary academy that later became Whitman College. Nevertheless, the missionaries' story was important to the college's beginnings, says Thomas Edwards, Whitman history professor.
Early trustees and administrators stressed the Whitmans' missionary work and Christian fortitude when soliciting financial help from churches in the East in the 1880s and during funding crises later. (The liberal-arts college no longer has a church affiliation.)
Today, Edwards says, there is awkwardness about the historical connection.
"I don't think they're very comfortable with it," said Edwards, who has taught at the college for 34 years. "It would be easier if the school were named Lewis and Clark. Everyone likes them."
Edwards believes the lack of discussion of the 1847 tragedy and its aftermath erases, however unwittingly, a significant portion of the Northwest's history.
"We have to look at how this happened," he said. "The thing is that this sort of conflict has been a true part of the American experience, an important thread in the American fabric."
Edwards and Whitman faculty organized a two-day symposium last week highlighting various perspectives on the 19th-century cultural clash. But that kind of reflection is rare, Edwards says. His tours of the Whitman Mission, once mandatory for freshman, now draw only a few students.
"I have to say the college does virtually nothing to recognize Marcus Whitman," said Derek Michael, a senior history major who delivered a paper at the symposium. "What he was attempting to do 150 years ago is un-PC in our world, and I think it scares some people."
Those who regret the limited discussion on the Whitmans say lessons can be drawn from the tragic story. They do not excuse the missionaries' sense of superiority about their culture. But history is not black and white, they say, so people need to deal with the gray.
"We always want to draw a line across history. But we as a people have to drill holes in that line," said "Bud" Eldon Kenworthy, a Whitman political-science professor. "We need some kind of rituals that revisit a painful place with honesty. It's going to help white people get rid of their own amnesia and discomfort around their own history."
"A time of no time"
Until the mid-1980s, a memorial service was conducted at the Whitman Mission National Historic Site on the Saturday closest to Nov. 29, the date the missionaries and 11 others were killed. People gathered by the "Great Grave," a long, rectangular slab of gray granite inscribed with the names of the dead. Speakers talked about the Whitmans and their good intentions. Sometimes, a representative of the Umatilla Confederated Tribes participated with traditional prayers.
Park ranger Roger Trick was relieved when administrators decided to discontinue the services. Interest had dwindled, he said, and the event seemed inappropriate, "almost a way to put them on a pedestal as martyrs and saints. They were much more human than that."
Trick hopes visitors today - about 80,000 a year - see more balance.
Before the museum was remodeled 10 years ago, it had just two displays of Cayuse artifacts and clothing. Very little was said about the Cayuse religion and way of life.
Today, photos of Cayuse chiefs in full regalia and ordinary men, women and children in traditional dress greet visitors at the museum entrance. Inside, a large illustration of a deer in a pristine grassland, with the Blue Mountains in the background, evokes the region before white settlement. With the painting is a quotation: "It was a time of no time. There were no fences then and no one owned the land."
Other displays attempt to put the Whitmans in historical context. Panels characterize the industrialism of the East, the popular notion of "manifest destiny" at the root of westward expansion, and the Whitmans' religious motivations. There are excerpts from Narcissa Whitman's diary, pieces of her china and some of Marcus Whitman's tools. Outside, on a neatly trimmed grass lot, bricks outline where the mission's buildings once stood.
"We're trying to get across the idea that the Cayuse culture was here and the Anglos just slammed into them," Trick said.
There are critics. Some say too little of the Whitmans' background is explained for today's audiences to comprehend their missionary impulse. Some see the information on Cayuse culture as much needed but now overemphasized. And others say a deeper exploration of the bloody event is skirted.
Yet, Superintendent Terry Darby believes the revamped displays give visitors a good balance of information.
"You can't have 13 people killed and not have an emotional issue, and you can't live this close to an Indian community and not be sensitive to their view," Darby said. "We want to show both points of view and not alienate one. So if it sounds like I'm waltzing through a minefield, I am."
"Healing needs to happen"
As remote as the violence of the 1840s and 1850s is to some, scars remain.
"The emotions and issues this raises, the whole thing is very convoluted," said Jackie Cook, a Colville tribe descendant. She is the curator for a museum and interpretive center that the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation will open in June at the base of the Blue Mountains near Pendleton, Ore. "We need to get beyond that. Some healing needs to happen."
Cook, who believes tragedy befell both the Whitmans and the Cayuse, said opinions on the event vary among tribal members. At one extreme, some call it the "Whitman judgment," and there are people doing research that seeks to prove the Whitmans were sent west to kill the Indians. Others say the violence was the standard of its time and leave it at that.
Cook, like Edwards, says the Whitmans must indeed be judged by the standards of their times in order to truly grasp what took place. But it has become difficult, she said.
"We just don't talk about this in polite society," she said. "It's politically incorrect to say anything against the tribes these days. We've become noble savages again and we avoid the topic again."
The past is something Marjorie Waheneka has chosen to confront. It's her job.
Waheneka, descended from Cayuse, Palouse, Nez Perce and Warm Springs Indians, knew little about the Whitmans before she first visited the Whitman Mission in her early 20s. In 1979, she came with her grandmother, who demonstrated her beadwork and weaving regularly at the historic site. Waheneka was hired as a ranger in 1980. Since then, she said, her work has brought her closer to her own history and allowed her to broaden the public's understanding of the mission killings.
Waheneka's feelings toward the Whitmans are a mix of admiration, sympathy and anger.
"I guess I found them courageous to make the journey out," said Waheneka. "When I imagined what the country looked like before, looking at how steep the Blue Mountain's canyons are, and knowing Narcissa Whitman was pregnant, I thought, `Wow, she must have been pretty darn tough.' "
She feels Narcissa's anguish over the drowning of her 2-year-old daughter. Waheneka herself has lost two children.
But the history can also make her bristle.
She read that the Cayuse were paid with a twist of tobacco for digging irrigation ditches - something she views as exploitative. She notes that Indians were allowed in only one room of the Whitmans' house.
"They didn't have enough patience to learn about the people," Waheneka said. "They didn't try to learn about the Indians' lifestyle. Theirs was the superior one. That's what made me so bitter."
Waheneka's research unearthed familial ties to this painful past. Her grandfather's grandmother fled the terrifying measles outbreak with her family at age 15, just before the killings.
"It was really frightening when people started dying all around," said Waheneka, who spoke at last week's Whitman symposium. "And there were rumors about being poisoned. You could see how it would affect people."
Looking closely at the past, Waheneka also discovered that her great-great grandfather was Cut Mouth John, a famous Indian scout who assisted the U.S. cavalry in the Cayuse War. Though she sometimes felt shame because Cut Mouth John was considered a traitor, she also takes pride in his connection to the land and the animals, something that deeply impressed the white soldiers, she said.
"You must always remember who you are and where you come from," Waheneka said. "So many elders have shared those words with me."
For historian Edwards, wrestling with the ambivalence of the Whitman story is necessary not only on the Whitman College campus but also throughout the state. The history forces people to ask why the United States was never able to come up with an effective and fair policy toward Native Americans.
For Rogers Miles, a Whitman religion professor, the greater lessons can be learned when the Whitmans are viewed with all their frailties and strengths, rather than as the heroic martyrs whom pageant planners commemorated five decades ago.
"I can see the Whitmans' motivations and I can see the kind of damage they did somewhat unwittingly," Miles said. "This is a movement in which they're going to usher in the millennium. They're as confident as Oedipus, and they're going to fail with the best of intentions."
Keiko Morris' phone message number is 206-464-3214. Her e-mail address is: kmor-new@seatimes.com
--------------------------------------------- Uncomfortable history: the `Whitman Massacre' ---------------------------------------------
`At this moment my feelings are peculiar. I hardly know how to define them. I have not one feeling of regret at the step which I have taken, but count it a privilege to go forth in the name of my Master, cheerfully bearing the toil and privation we expect to encounter.'
-- Narcissa Whitman
In a letter to her parents during her journey west in 1836
"I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country and help to found its religious institutions. Providence has its full share in all these events. . . . I am fully convinced that when a people refuse or neglect to fill the designs of Providence, they ought not to complain at the results. . . . The Indians have in no case obeyed the command to multiply and replenish the earth, and they cannot stand in the way of others in doing so. . . ."
-- Marcus Whitman
In a letter to his wife's parents
"In the fall of 1847 the emigration over the mountains brought the measles. It spread among the Indians, and owing to their manner of living it proved very fatal. It was customary for emigrant families who arrived late, to winter at the station (the Whitman's mission), and some seven or eight families had put up there to spend the winter of 1847. Among the arrivals was a half-breed named Jo Lewis. . . . We none of us liked him. . . . Owing to the sickness and . . . other causes, the natives began to show an insolent and hostile feeling. It was now late in the season and the weather was very inclement. Whitman's large family were all sick, and the disease was raging fearfully among the Indians, who were rapidly dying. I saw from five to six buried daily. The field was open for creating mischief. . . Jo Lewis was the chief agent. . . ."
-- Catherine Sager Pringle
Adopted daughter of the Whitmans who witnessed the killings and was herself taken captive in "Across the Plains in 1844" written in 1860
`Stickas, a friendly Christian Indian, . . . came out and told him (Marcus Whitman) that "Jo Lewis is making trouble: that he was telling his (Stickas's) people that the doctor and Mr. Spaulding were poisoning the Indians so as to give their country to his own people." '
-- Catherine Sager Pringle
"The poor Indians are amazed at the overwhelming numbers of Americans coming into the country. They seem not to know what to make of it. Very many of the principal ones are dying, and some have been killed by other Indians, . . . The remaining ones . . . do not wish to see any Sniapus (Americans) settle among them here; they are willing to have them spend the winter here, but in the spring they must all go on. They would be willing to have more missionaries stop and those devoted to their good. They expect that eventually this country will be settled by them, but they wish to see the Willamette filled up first."
-- Narcissa Whitman, August 1847
In a letter to her parents
There were no portraits made of Marcus or Narcissa Whitman during their lifetimes. These sketches, which surfaced in 1973, were made by Canadian artist Paul Kane, who visited the mission in 1847 a few months before the Whitmans were killed. Historians in 1973 deduced that the sketches were of the Whitmans. Later portraits and sculptures of the Whitmans were based on artists' conceptions and on relatives who were said to resemble them.
Narcissa Whitman's journal entries are reprinted courtesy PBS ONLINE, HTTP://www.pbs.org
