Category: whitman

Measles

The recent upsurge in measles cases in Florida and the US in general has doctors and public health officials scratching heads. Apparently, there is a big difference in infection rates when the percentage of children who receive the MMR—Measles, Mumps, Rubella—vaccinations drops from 95 % to 91%; transmission among the unvaccinated spreads more rapidly, and a few—stats say 3 %–of the vaccinated still get a mild case of the disease. That, in my understanding is in a nutshell what is happening in Florida and threatening elsewhere as measles cases in 2024 rise.Read Rich’s Post →

Catholics–and Providentialism

It would be easy now to pile on the Catholic Church—especially its hierarchy. The Vatican’s recent “repudiation” of the Doctrine of Discovery has been followed by the Maryland Attorney General’s announcement of “staggering sexual abuse” by church officials in his state. The Associated Press reported that “More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused over 600 children and often escaped accountability.” The documented abuse occurred over a span of 80 years, and was accompanied by decades of coverups. More money was spent on treatment and rehabilitation of perpetrators than on that of victims. And the Attorney General said that similar studies were addressing abuse in other dioceses.Read Rich’s Post →

The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday

Here’s how I found my way to The Way to Rainy Mountain

For the past few years, the Josephy Center has had a book group. It started with small, in-person meetings, and moved online with the coming of Covid. Our last book was Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West, by Blaine Harden. We were blessed to have Harden and Bobbie Conner and Chuck Sams join us for the discussion. Conner and Sams have Cayuse roots, and were consulted by Harden as he researched and wrote the book.Read Rich’s Post →

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 →

The Catholic Fur-Trading North

When I had the bookstore all those years ago, I kept a big supply of Bison Books from the University of Nebraska that told the tales of the fur traders and mountain men. It was not my thing; American history was not my thing. I read fiction and short stories, mysteries and books from and about the Ottoman Empire and the wars on the Eastern Front.Read Rich’s Post →

White Men Writing about Indians

Nez. Perce Reservations: 1855, 1863, 1873

I’ve been writing Josephy Library blog posts for ten years, telling stories of lies, outrages, and omissions regarding Indians in American history. From time to time, I’ve thought I should make a book, comb and clean the posts up a bit, sometimes combine a couple or three of them, write a few new episodes in my own growing understanding of a broader and more inclusive American history.

When I mentioned this to a publisher friend, he told me that Indian stories are indeed in demand, but people want to hear from Indians themselves, not from white interpreters. I stepped back from the book idea, but have continued to post on this blog, and I continue to bring Indians and their stories to the Josephy Center where I work. In fact, we recently put up an exhibit on “Nez Perce Treaties and Reservations From 1855 to Present.”

Read Rich’s Post →

The Second Great Awakening and the Missionaries



For the past several months one of my curiosities has been the early Christian missionaries in the Oregon Territory. Who were they? When and how did they come? What did they bring with them and what did they do on arrival? How did they get along with each other? Why Oregon?

Summer intern Erik and I had some good times discovering obscure references, learning about the spats among denominations, and wondering what possessed sane people, mostly living in New England, to forsake all to preach the Gospel to the Indians.

It looks like it traces back to the “Second Great Awakening,” a period of religious fervor, primarily in New England, but extending to Europe as well, that gave us Jonathan Edwards and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and Joseph Smith and the Mormon religion. Jason Lee was caught up in it, and raised funds and fervor for Oregon. The visit of the four Indians—Flathead and Nez Perce—to St. Louis found resonance with awakeners and inspired Father DeSmet and the Jesuits to head for Montana.

The Whitmans and Spaldings came West under the auspices of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). And here is the Wikipedia take on the Awakening and ABCFM: “The founding of the American ABCFM was inspired by the Second Great Awakening. In 1806, five students from Willliams College in western Massachusetts took shelter from a thunderstorm in a haystack. At the Haystack Prayer Meeting they came to the common conviction that ‘the field is the world’ and inspired the creation of the ABCFM four years later. The objective of the ABCFM was to spread Christianity worldwide.”

“A Cent-a-Meal: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” still bank

Jason Lee and the Methodists found their way to Oregon Territory in 1834, two years before the Whitmans and Spaldings with the ABCFM. The latter group was supported primarily by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Dutch Reformed congregations. The first ABCFM missionaries went to British India in 1812, and were followed between 1812 and 1840 by expeditions to the Cherokees in Tennessee, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Bombay, Northern Ceylon, China, Singapore, and Siam (Thailand); western and southern Africa; and the Middle East (Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the Holy Land).

And when the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions heard a report from their Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) mission about the “abundance of unconverted Indians on the West Coast” along came the Spaldings and Whitmans.

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Years and years and years ago, when I was a young Peace Corps Volunteer in Eastern Turkey, I had a Volunteer friend who had grown up in a missionary family in Lebanon and Syria. He talked about traveling across deserts on sand covered and non-existent highways from compass marker to compass marker in the 1950s. And said that his father had soon realized that the only converting going on was turning a few Arab Christians away from their Orthodox and Catholic churches—churches with histories longer than those of American missionary movements, or, for that matter, the United States! He wasn’t converting any Moslems, so he gave up proselytizing and went to teaching agriculture.

Turkey and the entire Middle East is predominantly Moslem, but not only are there many Moslem “denominations,” but significant numbers of Druze, Zoroastrians, and Christians. The Orthodox church in our nearby city of Diyarbakir dated to the 600s—and during my four years in the region I found other Christian churches, even went to a Christmas Eve service in a Chaldeon Catholic church where the liturgical language was Syriac or Aramaic, a language close to that spoken by Jesus and the early Christians.

I wondered then what possessed American missionaries to go half way across the world to struggle—mostly unsuccessfully—with converting Moslems and settle for gaining a few Protestant converts from Christian denominations older than their home country. And now I have it: the Whitmans and Spaldings might just as well have gone to Syria or Turkey as made their way West to the Oregon Territory. And if it hadn’t been for that haystack storm and conversion meeting it might have been a different world.

Today the news from Syria is about a Christian town being taken over by rebels of the jihadist faction, and Christians and other minority groups in Syria fighting with the Assad government to take it back. The NPR report said that the Syrian Christians were speakers of Aramaic, which took me back to that long ago Christmas Eve service in an old church with people whose ancestors had recited the same words in the same language almost 2000 years ago. There is something humbling and satisfying in that thought.

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Indian Gardens—one more time!


Ok, I should have thought this whole thing through before launching food travel theories. Josephy reminded us years ago, in Indian Heritage of America, 1492 and other places, that about half of present world food crops originated in the Western hemisphere: corn, beans, manioc, chocolate, tobacco—well, food and medicinal/drug crops. And we all know from fourth grade Thanksgiving programs that corn—Mesoamerican corn—had arrived in New England long before the English!
Diorama of Iroquois Indians tending maize caption, New York State Museum

But it is also true that Indians of what is now the Pacific Northwest were traditionally hunters, gatherers, and fishers, and most of these crops were not found in the region at the time of first white contact, Indians of the region had established economies and food cultures over countless generations before white contact, food cultures built around salmon, game, and readily available roots, bulbs, and berries. Did they have knowledge of corn? And when did tobacco arrive? Did they come through Indian trade routes, or with Delaware and Iroquois who were, by the late eighteenth century, part of the western fur trading business, or were the French and British traders themselves responsible for bringing tobacco, corn, and other domesticated vegetables West?

Friends have gently reminded me of the long association of Indians and gardens, and of the extensive pre-Columbian trade routes in North America. Keith Kirts speculated on crops coming from the Southwest—as horses surely did—before whites came overland. And Ralph Anderson commented that “From the east coast all through the Mississippi country were the remains of the mound-builders, corn and squash and beans gardens…  the agriculture that allowed the concentrated populations. By the time of the invasions of the Northwest… 1815-1820’s the Anishinabe had been gardening with and around the British forts and settlements for nearly 100 years.”
And as mentioned earlier, my mentor Alvin Josephy, and in his wake Charles Mann, in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, have tried to sledge-hammer home the importance of the pre-Columbian development of world food crops in this hemisphere.
These reflections and conversations have taught me that the development of domesticated agriculture in what we now call the Pacific Northwest is a complicated affair. The Spaldings and Whitmans probably have their places in it, but theirs are small roles in the very interesting drama of food and its travels around the globe.

 

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