The worst blow fell in 1847 when a deadly measles epidemic, a disease brought by the emigrants, swept through the Cayuse village. By mid-November, nearly half the Cayuse had died; at the epidemic’s height, four or five children died each day. And because Marcus Whitman was a doctor—but his healing potions did nothing to stop Indian deaths—the mission became a point of rage for many Cayuse. Some Cayuse even accused him of poisoning Indians.
Other whites recognized a dangerous situation brewing and warned Marcus. He worried, but he’d lived among the Cayuse for so long that he did not believe they would really hurt him. Narcissa, however, did fear they would all be killed. Elizabeth Sager recalled, “serious trouble was feared by them from the Indians. This talk was very guarded on their part, as they did not wish the fears of the children alarmed.”44
On November 29, 1847, a band of Cayuse, their faces painted black and white, attacked the mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa and eleven other people. Marcus was cut down with a hatchet; Narcissa was shot, her face mutilated. Forty-seven people, mostly emigrants, survived the attack, but they were held prisoner for the next month until a trader from the Hudson’s Bay Company negotiated their release.
The territory’s new governor pursued the Cayuse for nearly two years until the Indians responsible for the Whitmans’ deaths were turned over. Five Cayuse hanged for the crime, but this did not save the tribe. In 1848, Congress passed a bill creating the Oregon Territory. There was no room for the Cayuse and other Indian people.
The killings ended the ABCFM’s missions in Oregon. Narcissa had done her best, but she’d failed to understand the people she’d meant to help or to recognize how they might have seen her. As one friend wrote after her death, “It was the common remark among them that Mrs. Whitman was ‘very proud.’”45 After their deaths, Americans regarded Narcissa and Marcus Whitman as martyrs who’d died for their faith in the far, dark reaches of “heathendom.”
Miriam Davis Colt
An Experiment in Kansas
“What I crave must be gained by my own effort,” wrote Miriam Davis, one of 17 children born to a poor family in New York City.46 At age 15, she went to work, sewing and cleaning for hire. All the while she paid for her own schooling, and after eight years Miriam earned a teacher’s certificate. She married a fellow teacher, William Colt, and began a family in Montreal, Canada.
Eleven years later, William announced he required “more of Heaven’s pure air,” and Miriam reluctantly agreed to pull up stakes and move with their children, Willie and Mema, to Kansas. She copied down the lyrics of a new song, the refrain sweeping people up in the excitement of the west: “Ho, brothers! Come brothers! Hasten all with me, We’ll sing, upon the Kansas plains, The song of liberty.”
The Colts purchased shares in an experimental vegetarian colony settling in Kansas. William’s parents and sister, Lydia, also joined the venture. The Vegetarian Company, with a written constitution and elected directors, would make preparations, build a gristmill and sawmill, and have a boardinghouse ready for settlers to live in while they built their own new homes. Miriam believed that, by joining a ready-made community, her family might avoid the hardships experienced by so many pioneers. With the promise of a good climate, “where fruit is so quickly grown,” and with people whose taste and habits would match their own, she felt the venture might pay off handsomely.
Sheet music for a popular song promoting Kansas, 1856. Library of Congress
In April 1856, the Colt family began their journey west from New York via stagecoach and then train, finally reaching Kansas City on a steamer ship around the first of May. The word “city” seemed a stretch to Miriam, who observed that “it takes but a few buildings in this western world to make a city.” Outfitted with wagons, oxen, and provisions, they began the next leg of their journey, leaving steam power behind, wrote Miriam, to “try the virtue … in ox-power.”
Miriam resolved to make the best of things. After all, the whole point of the new community was the well-being of the members, achieved through abstaining from meats and alcohol, throwing themselves into work, and assembling frequently for uplifting discussions to secure “strength of body and vigor of mind.”
They slept in the wagon or lodged in houses along the route, shelters that “would only pass for apologies for houses at the north,” thought Miriam. At one farm, she couldn’t help noticing the wife’s downtrodden appearance, her feet bare and a white sack carrying a few quarts of cornmeal twisted up and thrown over her shoulder. Is this what I shall come to? Miriam wondered.
Kansas also faced tensions between “border ruffians,” who desired the spread of slavery into the territory, and free-soil settlers, who opposed slavery, like the Colts. “These Bandits have been sent in here, and will commit all sorts of depredations on the Free State settlers,” wrote Miriam, “and no doubt commit many a bloody murder.”
But her pen also captured the spring beauty all around her, even as her wagon sat mired in a mudhole and the family lunched on soda biscuits. She inhaled deeply “the sweet odor that comes from the blossoms of the crab-apple trees that are blooming in sheets of whiteness along the roadside.” Another day she wrote of “flowers blooming at our feet, and grasshoppers in profusion hopping in every direction.”
On May 12, the party decamped with high hopes, expecting to arrive at their new home by nightfall. Miriam envisioned an escort to lead the new settlers into town and a rifle salute. Instead, a steady rain pelted down, and they discovered their new home was nothing but a large campfire surrounded by tents—no snug boardinghouse. Women sat inside a large center tent grinding corn in hand mills. The tent held a stove, and for supper they dined on corn cakes, stewed apples, and tea.
More discouraging news hit the family the next day—no sawmill or gristmill had been built, something their investment money was supposed to have helped pay for. And there was only a single plow for the whole community. The lack of proper building materials from the promised sawmill hampered any attempt to build a home of more than canvas, bark, and wooden shakes.
Miriam and William moved their family from the tent village to the actual settlement site a mile away. Here they found a log cabin, measuring 16 feet by 16 feet, where the future community center would be. With a few other families, they set up there, laying a stone floor, flooring the loft, and adding a few shelves to hold plates and utensils. They sat on trunks and lay wagon boards across a washtub for a table. A blanket covered the doorway, but even weighted down it failed to block the wind. The Colt family set up housekeeping in the loft of the log cabin, sleeping on the floor atop a mattress stuffed with prairie grass. They shared the loft space with another family. More people slept on the stone floor below, wrapped in blankets.
Just a week later, many of the company who’d traveled to Kansas with the Colts departed. In the midst of the disheartening news that many families had already left, the Colts tried to make the best of things, although, as Miriam described it, “a heavy weight is resting upon each one’s heart.” She wondered, “Can anyone imagine our disappointment?”
Miriam also reveled in the beauty all around her and wrote often of the flowers and trees, the sunsets, and the lovely glow of the moon in a starlit sky. But certain elements of their new home, like the nightly howls of the wolves, inspired fears that outweighed the beauty. Sometimes Indians dropped by the house, sitting on the chairs and frightening Miriam, Willie, and Mema with their “painted” faces. The nearly nude forms of the men made her “shudder.” Rattlesnakes slithered in the grass and got in the house, and she feared letting Willie and Mema go outside.
The effort needed for everyday chores like washing and cooking caused constant headaches. Miriam did laundry in a creek, fuming that the company secretary, the man in charge, who was supposed to purchase necessary items, might have thought of soap! Clothes dried out in the sun, and Miriam feared Native Americans would steal their garments. She cooked outdoors, hampered by prairie winds that blew ashes, dirt, and smoke. “The
bottom of our dresses are burnt full of holes now,” she lamented, “and they will soon be burnt off.” Before long, necessity drove her to don the Bloomer costume, a knee-length dress worn over ankle-length full trousers, which allowed some freedom of movement.
Summer invited illness and hordes of invading mosquitoes. Miriam nursed the sick, cooked and lugged water for those in need, and even picked little bouquets of flowers to cheer people suffering with chills and fever. Everything meant more work: a storm dissolved the mud chinking in the shared log house and spattered mud over everything, which meant that dishes, beds, blankets, and people had to be cleaned. Miriam wondered at the changes that cooking and living outdoors had brought: “Put a blanket over my head, and I would pass well for an Osage squaw,” she commented. Her hands were the color of smoked ham, the skin peeling and burned.
The farm the Colts purchased lay about two miles from the community center, bordering lands of about 4,000 Osage Indians whose village lay across the Neosho River. Lands belonging to William’s parents and his sister Lydia connected with their property. But with only one plow and every man wanting to get his seed in, William often plowed at night under moonlight. They planted corn and vegetables and made plans to build their cabin. William called the place an elegant building spot and promised a neat little log home. When the one plow broke, William’s father took it to the nearest blacksmith 25 miles away for repairs.
When some of the company-promised supplies finally arrived, the Colts discovered they had to pay an exorbitant amount for goods they’d already paid money to help buy. The family’s corn and other vegetables were shooting up through the rich soil, but for the time being, everyone lived on cornmeal cooked up as johnnycakes and corn pudding served with milk. Precious wheat bread was reserved for William’s parents to eat.
Sickness stalked the family, and more trouble arrived when, by the first of July, the water dried up. William and Miriam discussed leaving, but William’s father declared he would not go and neither would his wife or daughter. The old man yoked up the oxen and headed for his claim four miles out, seeking water. Miriam and her husband felt they could not abandon the rest of the family and went with them. The claim had an “old Indian house” in which they could live—but it was on Indian land. Miriam worried the Osage would return from their summer hunting trip and find them there, “and I know not what our fate would be,” she wrote.
At the house, they slept on the floor, and Miriam tended to each family member as they fell sick. Miriam, too, suffered with headaches, weakness, and dizzy spells. But she dragged herself from her mattress to do a few chores, sitting down when exhaustion and her pounding head crippled her. By mid-July Miriam’s composure nearly shattered as she looked at her family and in-laws lying on the floor, tossing and turning with raging fevers and begging for water that Miriam was too weak to fetch. Finally, a neighbor lent them one of his hired hands to cut wood, bring water, and care for the livestock. “Just three months to-day,” wrote Miriam, “since we left home; mark the contrast!”
Miriam and William suffered a bad blow to their fortunes when their oxen ran off and couldn’t be found. Miriam spent several days looking for the precious work animals, even enlisting a neighbor’s help. The man loaned her a horse, which she rode astride in her bloomers—an unladylike pose that was shocking to her—but her neighbor “made no remark, and like a gentleman, as he was, never seemed to notice my position.” When she reached home and jumped off the horse, William smiled at her and asked, “Why, Miriam, what will you do next?”
With the return of the Osage—who frequently stole melons, pumpkins, and corn from the settlers’ fields—Miriam felt too afraid to stay on Indian lands. They returned to the log cabin in the unfinished community. Now nearly penniless, Miriam and William determined to leave the community behind, driven out by sickness, the loss of their oxen, and fear of the Indians. They tried unsuccessfully to recoup some of their investment in the Vegetarian Company scheme. Sadly, William’s parents and sister stubbornly remained behind, and several months later, Miriam heard that all three had died.
The Colts sold their wagon and whatever else they could, and they made arrangements to travel with others leaving for Saint Louis. One man in the party drank heavily and said he was a border ruffian, willing to kill them. Miriam did her best to calm him, but the family hastily left and joined a teamster and his son heading east. The water along the route was bad, covered in green scum, and though Miriam boiled it into tea, she hated for her children to have to drink such water “full of disease.”
They stopped in a town for help when Willie fell gravely ill, but the townfolk seemed more appalled by Miriam’s bloomers than the family’s plight. She spent a dark week of daily nursing and sleepless nights, hoping Willie would take a turn for the better but fearing the worst. When Willie died on September 24, she gently closed her son’s eyes and woke her husband, who was also sick. Only nine days later, William died too, and Miriam stepped “out on the sea of life alone,” half her family ripped from her side in a few short days. She couldn’t give up; she knew she must think of her daughter, Mema.
Stranded, Miriam sold what little she had left for gravestones and traveling money. Townspeople helped her redeem an insurance policy William had left and make arrangements to return to New York with Mema. Once there, she purchased a few acres of land, only to lose her farm to foreclosure a few years later. In an attempt to support herself and her daughter, Miriam wrote about their ill-fated colony in Went to Kansas, published in 1862. It detailed the few short months during the summer of 1856—the early days of Kansas settlement—when she faced disappointment, hardship, and heartbreaking loss.
Frances Grummond
Army Wife in Wyoming
Winding through the wilds of Wyoming on the way to Fort Phil Kearny in the fall of 1866, Frances Grummond earned her stripes as a new army wife the hard way. Wearing soft cloth slippers for comfort while jostling and jolting around in the back of an army ambulance wagon, Frances had climbed out to answer the call of nature. She forgot to tell the driver to wait, and when she returned to the trail, the wagon and her party had ridden off into the distance!
Grummond started to run after them, smashing through a patch of prickly cactus that punctured the slippers and sank cactus needles into her feet. She couldn’t stop, though; the wagons plodded on a good distance away, and fear of Indians sent her scampering in acute pain for nearly a mile. She reached her party and collapsed, exhausted and speechless. She had to be lifted into the wagon, where she spent the next two days of her journey tearfully pulling cactus needles from her feet.
Frances Grummond, around 1865. Photo File, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming
Wyoming was a long way from her home in Franklin, Tennessee, where Frances had met her husband, George Grummond, a Union officer, during the Civil War. In August 1865, a few months after the war’s end, they married. She’d quickly learned her first lesson about the life of an officer’s wife: packing, unpacking, and constant upheaval marked the days. Grummond’s orders, as an officer of the newly organized 18th US infantry, sent the young couple first to New York, then to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and finally west to the new fort in Wyoming Territory.
The government had opened a shortcut for gold seekers traveling to Montana, a road through the Powder River country that wound around the Big Horn Mountains. Known as the Bozeman Trail, the road cut through the heart of prime hunting lands of the Lakota Sioux. At Fort Laramie in June 1866, government negotiations with Chief Red Cloud and other Indian leaders to gain use of the lands were interrupted by the arrival of Colonel Henry Carrington, sent to build and command a line of new forts. Red Cloud stormed out of the meetings, incensed at the arrogance and manipulations of the government, which had sent soldiers, in his words, “to steal the road before the Indians say Yes or No.” Red Cloud’s warriors began a guerilla warfare campaign of resistance against the military invasion of their lands.
Meanwhile, Frances an
d George Grummond traveled west by train, steamboat, and army ambulance (a vehicle Frances came to despise over the 1,000 miles of travel). She yearned to escape the bumpy confines for freedom on horseback and grumbled at the army’s lack of concern for the comfort of female travelers bound to follow their husbands. A few months pregnant, Frances only hinted through her writings of her “delicate condition.”
The Grummond’s journey into the “heart of a hostile Indian country,” with only a mail party and an escort of six men, kept Frances’s nerves on edge the entire trip. Every beautiful mountain, hill, canyon, and ridge seemed alive with a “hidden foe.” They stopped at ranches and forts along the way or slept in the wagons with straw pillows and gray wool army blankets for bedding. Buffalo chips and dried sage brush supplied fuel when wood proved nonexistent.
Food consisted mostly of canned goods and bread; however, this “greatly simplified the preparation of meals, fortunately for me, in the absence of knowledge in the culinary art,”47 acknowledged Frances, who’d been raised in a Southern household with enslaved cooks. During a short stay at Fort Laramie, about 250 miles from their destination, the Grummonds ate at the officers’ dinner table, or “mess,” to spare Frances the ordeal of cooking.
Eighty miles from Fort Phil Kearny, they glimpsed towering Cloud Peak, their first view of the Bighorn Mountains. Frances’s joy at finally arriving shattered as they halted outside the fort’s gates to allow a wagon to pass. It carried “the scalped and naked body” of a member of the wood train, a detail of soldiers that sallied forth each day to cut timber for finishing the fort and building a stockpile of wood for the winter. She found consolation in the fact that the four other women living at the fort were officers’ wives “who extended their kindly and sisterly greetings. Hope sprang up!” Frances discovered, however, that “not a stick of timber could be cut, nor a load of hay secured for the garrison without conflict.” But she found this reality easier to bear in the reassuring and comforting presence of other women.
Women of the Frontier Page 6