The Doctor and His Wife
Marcus Whitman was not a complicated man, which was part of the problem. He was a physician from upstate New York, deeply religious, physically hardy, and possessed of a certainty about God's intentions that would have been admirable in a smaller theater. He had never met a Cayuse person when he volunteered to go west as a missionary in 1835. He had not studied their language, their customs, their history, or their existing beliefs. He had read the Bible in the original Greek and could set a broken bone and deliver a baby and he believed, without much examination, that this was everything a man needed to do God's work among the heathen of the Oregon Country.
His wife was more interesting. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was twenty-eight years old when they married in February 1836 — a marriage arranged largely so that Narcissa could accompany Marcus west, since the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions did not send single women into the field. She was tall, fair-haired, and had a singing voice that people remembered for decades afterward. She had grown up imagining herself a missionary, had applied to the Board as a single woman and been turned down, and when Marcus came along she understood what the arrangement was and accepted it. She was not indifferent to him. But she was going west regardless.
They traveled overland from Missouri in the summer of 1836 as part of a small missionary party, and Narcissa and her companion Eliza Spalding became the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains. The journey took five months and covered nearly three thousand miles by horse and wagon and, at the worst of it, on foot. When they finally descended into the Columbia River plateau that September and saw the flat, golden, treeless land spreading out toward the Blue Mountains, Narcissa wrote home that it reminded her of a painting. She did not write what kind.
They built their mission in the fall of 1836 at a place the Cayuse called Waiilatpu — "the place of the people of the rye grass" — near the confluence of two rivers in what is now eastern Washington, a few miles from present-day Walla Walla. Marcus built the house himself, thick adobe walls to hold out the winter cold, a kitchen, a sitting room, a room for the school they intended to open. Narcissa hung curtains. They planted a garden. They called it home.
Two Worlds in the Same Valley
The Cayuse had been living on this land for generations beyond counting. They were horsemen, traders, proud and independent, known across the plateau for the quality of their horses and the fierceness with which they defended what was theirs. They had heard about the missionaries before the Whitmans arrived — word traveled fast on the plateau — and their reaction to the prospect of a mission in their valley was not uniformly hostile. Some Cayuse were curious about the new religion and its strange rituals. Some wanted the material goods the missionaries brought with them. Some, particularly the older leaders, looked at the growing trickle of white travelers passing through on the trail and decided that having their own missionary, a white man who owed them something, might be a useful thing.
What nobody had adequately explained to the Cayuse was what the Whitmans actually wanted from them. Marcus wanted their souls. He wanted them to stop moving with the seasons, to give up the great communal bison hunts east of the mountains, to settle in one place and farm and pray and become, as nearly as possible, Protestant farmers from New England. Narcissa wanted to teach their children, to fill them with scripture and English and the particular rhythms of the civilization she had grown up in. Neither of them seems to have spent much time wondering whether the Cayuse wanted any of this.
For the first few years, an uneasy coexistence held. Some Cayuse attended the Sunday services Marcus held in the mission house, sitting on the floor while he preached through an interpreter, though attendance was inconsistent and the number of genuine converts remained small. Children came to Narcissa's school, drawn as much by the novelty as the instruction. The Cayuse traded horses and food for the goods the Whitmans imported from back east. Marcus treated the sick — and there were always sick, because European diseases had been moving through plateau tribes since the Spanish first arrived on the continent, and the Cayuse immune system had never learned to fight them.
Narcissa's letters home during those years are candid in a way she may not have intended. She wrote about her loneliness with a plainness that cuts across nearly two centuries. She missed her mother. She missed music. She had one close friend among the Cayuse, a woman she called Margaret, and when Margaret died of illness in 1839, Narcissa grieved in a letter that is among the most human things she ever wrote. She and Marcus had a daughter, Alice Clarissa, born in 1837, the first white child born in the Oregon Country. In 1839, the two-year-old toddled down to the river and drowned. Narcissa never recovered from it. She grew remote after that, harder to reach, withdrawn into her faith in a way that made her seem, to the Cayuse, cold.
The mission limped along. The converts did not come in the numbers the Board had expected. Marcus's medical reputation among the Cayuse was growing — he had treated enough people successfully that word spread, and by the early 1840s they were coming to him from considerable distances — but his religious influence was not keeping pace. He was a better doctor than he was a preacher, and he knew it, and it frustrated him, and his frustration occasionally curdled into something that showed on his face.
The Road Opens
In 1842, Marcus made a decision that changed everything. He rode east alone through the winter to argue with the Board, which had been considering closing the Whitman mission due to poor results, and while he was in the East he lobbied everyone he could find for the settlement of the Oregon Country by American emigrants. He came back the following spring leading a wagon train of nearly a thousand people — the Great Migration of 1843, the largest organized overland migration in American history to that point. The Oregon Trail was now a road, and the road ran directly through Cayuse land, and it would never stop being used.
What Marcus had done, whether he fully understood it or not, was open a door. The emigrants came through in hundreds that first year, then thousands, then tens of thousands. They needed food and horses and a place to rest and a doctor who could treat the sick they'd been accumulating since Missouri. The mission at Waiilatpu became a waystation, then a destination, then something that the Cayuse looked at with growing unease. These were not traders passing through. These were settlers. And the settlers looked at the land the way settlers look at land — as something waiting to be taken.
The Cayuse began to understand what the mission meant in a way they had not before. Marcus Whitman had not come to live among them as a guest. He had come to replace them.
The Dying
In the late summer of 1847, a wagon train came through carrying measles. It was not the first disease to pass through the valley — the Cayuse had been losing people to epidemic illness for years, the familiar litany of smallpox, influenza, dysentery, and fevers that had been reducing the plateau tribes since before anyone then living could remember. But the measles that arrived in 1847 was particularly savage, moving through the Cayuse camps with a speed and thoroughness that was almost incomprehensible to people watching from outside and unbearable to the people inside it.
Marcus treated the sick. He moved between the mission house and the Cayuse lodges day and night, dispensing medicine, setting up a makeshift ward in the mission house, doing what a frontier doctor in 1847 could do, which was not as much as he wished. The emigrant children he treated tended to recover. The Cayuse died in numbers that, by November, amounted to something between a third and a half of the entire tribe — men, women, children, elders, the ones who held the old knowledge and the ones who were supposed to carry it forward.
The Cayuse watched all of this and made an observation that their tradition had prepared them to make. Among the plateau tribes, a healer who lost too many patients was considered dangerous — not merely incompetent, but actively malevolent, a man whose medicine had turned bad or who was using it against the very people he was supposed to protect. This belief was not superstition in the sense of being groundless. It was a system of accountability, developed over generations in a world where a single bad healer could devastate a small community. The logic was: if your patients keep dying, something is wrong with you.
Marcus Whitman's patients were dying at a rate that, by Cayuse reckoning, had moved well past the threshold of explanation.
There was something else. The emigrant children Marcus treated with the same medicines recovered. The Cayuse children died. The Cayuse leaders who gathered outside the mission house and watched the doctor move between beds did the arithmetic. They did not know about acquired immunity, about the generations of exposure to European diseases that had given white children a partial protection that Cayuse children did not have. What they saw was that the white doctor gave medicine, and white children lived, and Cayuse children died. The conclusion they drew from this was the same conclusion any reasonable person in their position, with their knowledge and their history, would have drawn.
Marcus Whitman was killing them.
November 29, 1847
The morning was cold, the sky the flat grey of a Columbia Plateau November, the kind of cold that gets into buildings and stays. The mission compound held around seventy people — emigrants wintering over, the Whitman household, a few mission workers, and the sick in their pallets in the main room. Marcus was in the kitchen grinding medicine. Narcissa was somewhere in the house. Neither of them knew what was about to happen, though there had been warnings, oblique and specific, that the Whitmans had either not understood or had understood and pushed away because to accept them would have required leaving, and leaving was something neither of them was prepared to do.
The Cayuse men who came that morning came with tomahawks and guns. The attack began inside the mission house and moved outward in the chaos that follows when violence enters a small, enclosed space and there is nowhere to run. Marcus was struck first, in the kitchen. He was still alive when Narcissa found him, and she dragged him toward the sitting room, and then she was shot through a window, and the day became something that the survivors spent the rest of their lives trying to describe and never quite could.
By the end of the day, thirteen people were dead. Marcus Whitman. Narcissa Whitman. Eleven others. Fifty-three women and children were taken captive and held for a month before the Hudson's Bay Company negotiated their release, paying a ransom in blankets and shirts and tobacco and other goods. The captives were released in December, cold and traumatized, into a world that would spend the next generation debating exactly what had happened and who was to blame for it.
What It Meant
The men who carried out the attack were not acting in madness or irrationality. They were acting in the logic of their own world, a world in which a healer who kills is a threat that must be removed, in which the arrival of thousands of settlers on your land is a thing that must be stopped before there is nothing left to stop for. The disease, the dying children, the endless wagons on the trail — these were not separate problems. They were the same problem wearing different faces, and Marcus Whitman, standing at the center of all of it, had become, in Cayuse eyes, the face of the thing that was consuming them.
The territorial government's response was swift and did not distinguish carefully between the Cayuse who had carried out the attack and those who had not. A war followed, prosecuted against the Cayuse broadly, ending in 1850 with five Cayuse men — Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, Klokamas, Isiaasheluckas, and Kiamaspkin — surrendering themselves and standing trial for the murders in Oregon City. They were convicted and hanged on June 3, 1850. Tiloukaikt, asked before his execution if he had anything to say, replied that he did. He said that white men had come to his country and claimed the right to judge and execute him. He did not understand, he said, why this was considered justice.
The Cayuse as a people survived the war but never recovered their former power. Their land was taken. Their numbers continued to decline. They were eventually consolidated with the Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes on the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon, where their descendants still live today.
Waiilatpu became a national historic site in 1936, ninety years after the Whitmans first broke ground there. The adobe foundations of the mission house are still visible beneath the grass, low ridges in the earth tracing the outlines of rooms where Narcissa hung curtains and Marcus ground medicine and a two-year-old girl named Alice Clarissa once climbed down to the river on a summer afternoon while no one was watching. The Blue Mountains rise to the east, the same mountains the Whitmans saw when they first came over the trail and looked down at the valley that would be the whole of their world for eleven years. On a clear day the view is extraordinary. It probably always was.