Category: Marcus Whitman

A Bigger American History

My last rambling blog post tried to link missionaries Whitman and Spalding, Catholic and anti-Catholic Northwesterners, Yale historians, Manifest Destiny, the Fur Trade, Whitman College and Bison Books into a tidy essay on history and historiography. I could have done a blog post on each, I imagine, rather than make that untidy bundle.Read Rich’s Post →

Another Nez Perce Book

William Vollman’s new novel, The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War, is getting rave reviews. I have it, have glanced at the first few pages and looked at the extended notes and acknowledgements—and hoisted the 1350 page and what must be five-pound volume—but have not begun reading it. I am waiting for a five or six hour piece of time to take the plunge—seeing it and reading reviews having convinced me that I cannot do it justice or give myself an honest go at it in bedtime snatches.

But I have been thinking about it, and thinking about how the Nez Perce story captured Alvin Josephy 65 years ago and continues to capture writers and readers 138 years after the Nez Perce War put it on the front pages of New York newspapers. So this is a quick—pre-Vollman book-read—meditation on the enduring and captivating nature of the Nez Perce Story.

1. The Nez Perce came to national consciousness with Lewis and Clark, an iconic event in American history. And, according to accounts, they saved the Corps of Discovery—from wrong routes across the mountains and starvation—and impressed the Captains with intelligence, physical appearance and stature. According to the explorers, the Nez Perce also impressed with their horsemanship—European-Americans could not match the Indians with gelding technique and selective breeding.

2. Many of the Nez Perce did convert to Christianity, and they did not turn on their missionaries as the Cayuse and others turned on the Whitmans. (I credit this to chance: the Nez Perce got Eliza Spalding, the only one of the first four missionaries who invited Indians into her home and bothered to learn their language. Her husband, Henry Spalding had a temper in the name of the Lord, and the Whitmans, in my reading, were distant and mean. And of course measles visited the Whitmans and the Cayuse and not the Spaldings and their Nez Perce hosts.)

3. This conversion gave one band of Indians—what would become the lead non-treaty band—a Christian name, “Joseph.” It was a name the public could pronounce and relate to; it was not “foreign” like Toohoolhoolzote, and not an unlikely name translation like White Bird or Looking Glass. It was your brother’s or father’s name.

4. The Nez Perce were strong and smart. A lawyer friend says that a careful reading of the 1855 treaty, a treaty that resulted in only one tribe getting its own reservation, shows skilled negotiators. And Looking Glass’s arrival at the Walla Walla treaty site from buffalo country, which occurred after the other chiefs and tribes were assembled and is commemorated in the Gustav Sohon drawing, must have been palpable in its demonstration of power and dignity.

5. The Nez Perce War is recent; some call it the “last” Indian war. As Joseph discovered after the War in North Dakota, by 1877 trains and telegraphs moved people and messages across the land, and photographers documented events. The Nez Perce War was covered by the eastern press. And when Joseph passed away in 1904, New York newspapers announced the death of America’s “most famous Indian.”

6. Nez Perce Country. The lands of the Nez Perce, from the Wallowas north and east, across the Grand Ronde and Snake River canyons, are rugged and, in comparison to most traditional Indian lands, unchanged from the eons of Indian occupation. One can approximate the 1200-mile Nez Perce fighting retreat in a car, but foot or horseback one can make it—and some do, even today, across the same landscape with most of the 1877 landmarks.

7. The Euro-American ambivalence towards Indians: From the first meetings in Jamestown and New England, new settlers’ attitudes towards Indians were confused and confusing. Settlers depended on tribes for survival, did not understand or want to understand different cultures, feared what was different, admired what was different, but in any case wanted the land, the beaver pelts, the tobacco, fish and the whales. Indians were paraded in front of European courts. There were white women who were captured by Indians, and, in some cases, did not want to return to their own; and white men—think of the fur traders, who happily married Indian women and in many ways became natives; and there were also Indians who demonstrated that they could learn white ways. When the Nez Perce evaded American armies, Joseph—who, as historians have labored to show was not a war chief—was depicted as the “Red Napoleon.” Our advanced armies could not have fallen victim to uneducated savages! He must be brilliant. The Nez Perce gained supporters in the Eastern Press.

I’ll stop at 7—the number of drummers at a traditional ceremony.  And this one, number 8 it would be, is primarily a white issue, because most importantly, the Nez Perce War came near the end of 200 years of growing white dominance of the continent, and has raised and continues to raise feelings of guilt for injustices done the Nez Perce people—and to all Indians. The guilt is accompanied by admiration for Indian courage in the face of mistreatment, and astonishment that Indians have survived.

Now I think I am ready to start reading Vollman.

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Disease, religion, and the “here and now”


Smallpox didn’t rate a line in the ‘Western Civilization textbook that I used in 1961—The Course of Civilization, by Strayer, Gatzke, and Harison.  In fact, the Plague, or Black Death, which some now think wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the mid fourteenth century, gets less than a page. Ironically, the disease is credited with preceding and influencing “bloody peasant rebellions…, senseless civil wars,” and “the witchcraft delusion,” in which “innocent men and women were falsely accused of practicing black magic.”
Prior to Alfred Crosby’s linking biology to traditional history, I guess that was par for the course: history was wars and politics; disease was for the biologists and epidemiologists to discover and discuss, and poets to mourn. Mention was brief and, like the Salem Witch Trials, a sideshow left to novelists and preachers to explore.
Even without the plague, life in medieval Europe—for the more than 80 percent who were peasant farmers—was always precarious. If the child made it past the first year or two, self-immunizing against common diseases in the process, life expectancy might be 30 or 40 years. Accidents and infections were rampant.  A year or three of drought or heavy rains brought hunger and sometimes starvation. And the wealthy classes—e.g., nobles and churchmen—fought and enlisted the peasantry to fight—and die—for them.
As the Little Ice Age—roughly 1400-1850—tightened its grip on the old world, thousands ran or were shipped to the new world as indentured servants. Over half of the Europeans who came to North America between 1600 and 1776 came that way. And by 1600, more than half of the indigenous people in North America had already been slain by smallpox, measles, and other maladies mostly sent ahead by Europe’s advance guard of explorers and fishermen. Eurocentric thinking—which saw European tools and religious beliefs as superior to anything “discovered” in America, quickly covered over 30,000 years or more of complex civilizations and histories as white Europeans marched across the continent.
We don’t’ know what life expectancies were among Indian tribes—though it surely varied greatly from tribe to tribe and even continent to continent. And the Little Ice Age and the Great Warming that preceded it took their tolls on the populations in the Americas before European arrival. In the Great Warming, Brian Fagin accounts for huge population losses on the California coast, in the desert southwest, and among the Mayans and pre-Incans. In other words, life for indigenous Americans before the European arrival was precarious too.
Among small and dispersed tribes in areas of great natural resources, as in what is now the Pacific Northwest, it might have been easier to cope with weather and disease before the Europeans. But we know now that these diseases crept in—from the sea, with horse-mounted Indians, with the fur trade—well ahead of the Europeans who carried them. With horses and guns and metal pots came smallpox, measles—and missionaries.
This week’s “aha” moment came when it occurred to me that the Indians and the early white settlers held very similar religious views—or at least “goals” for their religious practices and beliefs. With life expectancy short and a world full of hazards, what religion offered was a bit of power and some solace in dealing with it! Lewis and Clark doctored—and they had guns. The four Indians who went back to St. Lewis to find Clark were looking for some of the white religion’s power. Father Desmet and his Catholic troops among the Flathead wedged their way in with ceremony and similarities—weyakin/angels; baptism/sweat lodge; chapel/long house. But when the Indians were asked to give up their own rather than supplement it with the new, they chased the Catholics off.
And of course white doctor Whitman’s ineffectiveness in dealing with measles led to his Indian death sentence.
There might have been pious Christians who carried real visions of an eternal hereafter, and Indians I’m sure felt that spirits continued after death. How long and in what form seems less vivid. I surmise spiritual presences who might be leaned on with all other religious tools—weyakins, dances and ceremonies—in dealing with the day to day struggles of life. My guess is that for most white settlers looking at high infant death losses and 40 years as old, religion was just such a tool. You did what you could to build a future for offspring—and to acquire goods to enjoy now. And baptized and genuflected and prayed for help. And, Indian or white, if you were a man (yes, my guess is that gender roles on the American frontier were firm and exceptions rare) you might pursue fame, which Indian oral tradition and white books told you did endure.
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The Whitman Massacre—a Truer History


Some days I just want to shout at Alvin—Is this what you meant?
After a few years wrestling with his writing and remembered conversations, poking through the books and journals he left to the Josephy Library—the Oregon Historical Quarterlies are gold mines!—and reading “new” historians Crosby and Mann, I might be getting a grasp on what Alvin meant by “leaving the Indians out of American History.”
They are, Alvin said, always a “sideshow,” helpers and combatants in first European colonization of the “new” (to Europeans) world, allies and enemies in early confrontations with British settlers, obstacles to be overcome on the path to settling the North American Continent, and always, by some Euro-Americans, people to be looked after, cared for as children on their way to civilization as their own cultures naturally vanished. Indians have rarely been treated as primary actors in the historical narrative, agents on their own behalf and/or cooperators in five centuries of European settlement of the hemisphere.
One can pick up the thread of Alvin’s argument at many points on the historical grid, and the standard narrative changes, becomes richer, and, finally, helps explain the incredible resilience of tribal peoples. Here’s one. The Spring 1994 edition of the OHQfeatures a long article on “The Pacific Northwest Measles Epidemic of 1847-48” by anthropologist Robert Boyd. I’ll try to unravel briefly.
We know the story of the Whitman Massacre, how some Cayuse Indians, thinking that missionary Marcus Whitman was out to murder them and take their land, killed Marcus and Narcissa and eleven others. And we might remember that it was a measles epidemic that precipitated it all. Maybe remember that measles must have been carried to the Whitman Mission by Oregon Trail emigrants.
I’ll not distill Boyd’s entire article, but mention a few points to paint a broader historical picture of Walla Walla, the Cayuse and related Columbia Plateau tribes, and a more general view of white settlement and Indian-white relationships across the region.
First, Boyd provides background on white diseases in the now-Northwest. How smallpox arrived in the 1770s on the Coast and traveled into the interior precipitating a first big die-off of Indians. The pox probably arrived by Spanish ship, but might have come across the Rocky Mountains with Indians riding European horses –they got the horse about 1730. A second smallpox epidemic in 1801-02 definitely came via “Indian horsemen returning from the Great Plains.” There is discussion of other European diseases hitting the region, and of the peculiar habits of measles.
Measles were epidemic throughout much of Europe and North America in 1846-47. But Boyd argues that measles were not brought to the mission by white emigrants, but with Walla Walla and “Kye-use” Indians returning from a long sojourn in Northern California. The mobility provided by the horse had given tribal people the means to travel to the plains for buffalo, and to California for cattle!
And in 1847, just an incubation period ahead of the measles breakout at Walla Walla, a messenger at the head of some 200 Indians came back from California with sad news—documented by artist Paul Kane, of the failure of their mission and the terrible deaths of more than 30. The names of the dead were announced in a long ceremony at Fort Nez Perces (Walla Walla) and then messengers were sent in every direction to spread the sad news.
And, most likely, the disease. According to Boyd, at this point the white emigrants picked it up and carried it to the Willamette Valley, and from there traders and trappers and emigrants distributed measles all the way to Sitka, Alaska.
Back in Walla Walla, the Indians’ remedies—gathering together in sweats and drinking cold water—exacerbated the situation. Dr. Whitman’s medicines were “tested” by the Indians: two sick Indians and one who was not sick visited him for his treatment—and all died. Among the Cayuse, situated in three major bands but totaling only about 500 souls, over 200 are thought to have died with measles.
The test they had given Whitman—the Indian who was not sick having died, and the insistence of an insider, one Joe Lewis, that Whitman’s medicine was poison, led the Cayuse chiefs to order Whitman’s execution.
Further north, at the Hudson Bay’s Fort Colville, among Spokanes, Coeur d’Alenes, and some Nez Perce, the missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept sick Indians dry and warm, and fed them cayenne pepper tea and Nitre. Although many died—especially children—more survived, and the Walkers were given some credit.
So now we have a much richer story, one that tells us more about Indians—tribal complexities, chiefs and bands–and horses, cattle, the fur trade and trade routes. We learn about religious views—Christian and Indian—on diseases, and their spread before theories of contagion were fully known. It’s as if the Whitman Massacre and its standard narrative have cheated us of our true history.
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More on Nez Perce gardens and fur traders


I argued against missionary Spalding as the original source of Wallowa Nez Perce gardens in my last blog post, went on a laborious journey through Spokane House, Spokane Garry, the Church of England, and the fur trade as alternative sources of seeds and irrigation techniques. And then got onto the thought that this all happened with people and players—Hudson’s Bay, the North West Fur Company, David Thompson—who end up being on the Canadian side of history, so do not get attention in standard USA history books.

I think that last line is quite true, but my circuitous argument about Spokane Garry and his time at the Red River School under the Anglicans probably was too much. Friend and long-time historian of the fur trade John Jackson—Children of the Fur Trade—made it all simpler in a brief response to my post:

“The curmudgeon can’t resist pointing out that the early Nor’westers tried planting gardens at places they passed, just in hope something might grow.  I think David Thompson even put in some peas, turnips, and barley at the Tobacco Plains on the Kootenay River by 1809 or so. That surely was before Presbyterians at Walla Walla, and Methodists didn’t plant anything until they got to fine land claims in the Willamette Valley.
“Gardening is just a step away from digging roots and tribeswomen were imaginative.  The Astorians were not very pleased with the gardens on the lower river but seeds could have found their way upstream.  Tribes may have been growing corn or tobacco, although I can’t recall seeing any reference to seeds from the HBC [Hudson’s Bay Company] or NWC [North West Company].  Jack Nisbet [author of Sources of the River, a chronicle of Nisbet’s attempt to follow David Thompson’s travels across Western North America to the Pacific] has some comments on growing tobacco if I recall correctly.”
How right that all sounds. Tobacco was a common trade good, and there is nothing like an addictive crop to spur opportunistic gardening in the territory. And those fur traders returned to their posts again and again—even ones built hastily when they ran out of travel season and hunkered for a winter, so a bit of tobacco or some spuds or turnips planted in spring would be welcome in a fall return to old posts and places.
And ships—Russian, English, Spanish, and French—traveled the Pacific Coast long before missionaries and white settlers came overland. A smallpox epidemic, which probably arrived by sea, killed 30 percent of the indigenous population of what we now call the Pacific Northwest in the 1770s. Seeds surely could have traveled the same routes. And once ashore, might have made it to the big fishing and trading grounds at Celilo along with the dentalia so popular in Indian adornment. And from Celilo—anywhere!
So my Jackson informed guesses are: 1. that the Nez Perce gardens on the Grand Ronde River owed somehow to the fur traders; 2. that missionaries kept more notes and diaries than did fur traders—and were better marketers of their exploits; how central Whitmans and Spaldings are to the standard Northwest narrative; 3. that Indian trade networks were extensive and that goods moved up and down the Columbia and across the West way before the Whitmans and Spaldings–so seeds and gardening knowledge were traveling in many directions by the time of the Ws and Ss; and 4. that in this case as in many others we neglect the people and events that were important in their time in the Oregon Territory, but ended up on the Canadian side of the narrative of North American history.
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