Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  In this spreading conviction the natives were assisted by a number of what Bancroft called “dissolute characters, half-breeds from the mountains to the east, hanging upon the skirts of the travellers.” These men, “whose wild blood was full of the ichor of hatred of religion and civilization, and poisoned with jealousy of the white race, the worst traits only of which they had inherited,” were likened to a white-hot brand being towed through the tinder of the stricken Indian villages.

  Chief among these firebrands was a French-Canadian drifter with the Americanized name of Joe Lewis, who was said to have come to Oregon from Maine. He appeared at Waiilatpu in the fall of ’47, destitute and with his clothing in rags. Whitman fed and outfitted him and tried to find employment for him, but Lewis seemed content to be a hanger-on and soon came to be regarded as a troublemaker. This idea was proven when the idler fastened himself to the Cayuse and became instrumental in spreading the calumny that the measles epidemic could be traced to Dr. Whitman’s blueprint to steal the Indians’ lands.

  Lewis was said to have met with a tribal council and reported that Whitman, and Henry Spalding at the Lapwai mission, were writing to friends in the East to have fresh supplies of poison shipped in to kill the Cayuse and Nez Percé people. Lewis even reported to the council a conversation he claimed to have overheard between the two missionaries. Spalding, Lewis said, asked Whitman why he was so slow in his killings among the Cayuse and the doctor replied, “Oh, they are dying fast enough; the young ones will die off this winter, and the old ones next spring.”

  The source of Lewis’s alleged remarks was William Craig, a forty-year-old Virginian who had come out to Oregon in 1829 after trapping in Blackfeet country with Jedediah Smith. Following a peripatetic career as a fur trader, he recrossed the Rockies and established a farm eight miles north of the Spalding mission. He was distrusted by Henry Spalding, who believed Craig the ringleader of a group of malcontents causing problems among the Nez Percé. But Craig’s account of the Joe Lewis-Cayuse council conversation bore the stamp of truth despite the fact that he was the second bearer of it. The story had been told to Craig by a Cayuse who swore by it and added that Lewis told the tribal council that “unless they killed Dr. Whitman and Mr. Spalding quick, they would all die.”

  4

  John McLoughlin’s warnings, the pre-epidemic trepidations of the missionaries that the Indians might one day rise, the massive increase in emigrant traffic, and the scourge accompanying it all rushed to a fatal conclusion in November 1847.

  The third week of the month began routinely when Henry Spalding rode down to Waiilatpu with his ten-year-old daughter Eliza (named for her mother) to put the girl in the Whitmans’ school. Accompanying the Spaldings was a Mr. Jackson, who led a string of mules loaded with grain to be milled. En route they paid a visit to a familiar figure in the valley, Chief Peupeumoxmox, “Yellow Serpent,” of the Walla Wallas, whose camp lay near the river and fort bearing the tribal name. The chief was an intelligent and dignified man related by forebears and marriage to the Cayuse, Yakima, and Nez Percé tribes, and he was influential among all the native people of the Oregon Country. He had sent his son to be educated among the Methodist missionaries in the Willamette valley, but in 1844, after the young man was murdered at Sutter’s Fort, Yellow Serpent had entertained the idea of a war against the whites, in California and even along the Willamette. He was eventually deterred from this plan by John McLoughlin, who told the chief that such an action would result in the extermination of his people.

  Still regarded as “friendly” to whites even after some of his tribe died in the measles epidemic that winter, the chief confided in Spalding that he had heard the rumors about the Americans trying to destroy the Cayuse but said he did not believe them.

  Spalding and his daughter reached Waiilatpu on Monday, November 22, and spent the week with the Whitmans. On Saturday, a messenger arrived from the Cayuse camps in the Umatilla valley, thirty miles south, asking for assistance. The missionaries mounted up and rode out in a rainstorm. Spalding later remembered that they talked about how they had entered the valley in ’36 along the same route they were now riding, and about the disturbing Indian threats both were hearing. At one point Whitman said, “But my death will probably do as much good for Oregon as my life can.”

  They rode to the villages on the south edge of the Umatilla, visited the Cayuse chiefs Five Crows and Tauitau, and ministered to some sick villagers. Then, on Sunday afternoon, November 28, they reached the lodge of a chief named Sticcas, considered a friend of the missionaries. He warned Whitman that Joe Lewis was stirring up trouble among the Cayuse and advised the doctor to leave Waiilatpu “until my people have better hearts.” This alarmed Whitman enough that he decided to break his own rules against working or traveling on the Sabbath to hasten back to his mission. Spalding stayed behind for the day, and, at dawn on Monday, as he prepared to mount his horse not far from the chief’s lodge, a native woman warned him to avoid the Place of the Rye Grass. This was something Spalding could not do: He had left his daughter there and so hurried on, his path leading directly from the north side of the Umatilla past the camps of Tiloukaikt, a Cayuse chief who had troubled Whitman in the past, and a younger man named Tomahas.

  Whitman arrived home at near midnight on the twenty-eighth. He was exhausted from the ride but stayed up to relieve Narcissa, who was nearly as fatigued from nursing three of their adopted children, Helen Meek and Louise and Henrietta Sager, who were ill. He ate breakfast alone. Narcissa remained in her room and when one of the Sager girls took a tray of food to her, she found her sitting on a chair, sobbing into a handkerchief.

  In the dawn chill Whitman went outside the mission house to supervise the butchering of a beef, then made his rounds to check on his patients at the station hospital. On that day, November 29, three more Cayuse children were discovered dead, one belonging to Chief Tiloukaikt, who had earlier lost two others to the disease. They were quickly buried, with Whitman presiding with prayers, this a depressing, daily occurrence.

  School opened at nine.

  The T-shaped Waiilatpu mission house lay on an east-west axis with the crossbar of the T at the west end. It consisted of a parlor, a sitting room with stairs leading to a small loft, and an “Indian Room” with sleeping quarters. At the southern end of the neck of the T was a half-completed addition to the building, and running north lay the schoolroom, bedrooms, and a spacious kitchen next to the crossbar with doors opening into the sitting room, the Indian room, and outside. The house was spacious and comfortable, warmed by three large fireplaces, and except for some low fencing, open and unprotected.

  As the twenty-ninth wore on, Whitman, after two days without sleep, walked through the kitchen to the sitting room of the house and sat by the fire to read and rest. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, as he nodded there, Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, and some other Cayuse men knocked on the outside door that led into the kitchen. Narcissa answered and turned toward the sitting-room door. “Doctor, you are wanted,” she said.

  What occurred in the next few minutes remains, a century and half later, confused by the several survivor accounts, but it appears that Tiloukaikt demanded some medicines and, as the doctor came through the door, he tried to push him back into the sitting room. Whitman resisted, shut the door behind him, and went to the cabinet to fetch the medicines, telling Narcissa to leave the room and close the kitchen door behind her. There were two children in the kitchen, Mary Ann Bridger, Jim’s daughter, adopted by the Whitmans, and, just recovering from the measles, seventeen-year-old John Sager, one of the seven Sager children whose parents had died on the Oregon Trail. The two youngsters saw Dr. Whitman hand some medicines to Tiloukaikt, saw Tomahas step behind the doctor, swing a brass tomahawk, and strike Whitman on the head, and saw the doctor crumple to the floor as one of the Indians shot at him while Tiloukaikt and Tomahas hacked at his face and head with their war axes.

  John Sager drew a pistol but was shot before he could fire it;
Mary Bridger shrieked, climbed out the kitchen window, and ran to the west end of the station house yelling, “The Indians are killing Father and John!” Whitman, blood gouting from his wounds, staggered out the kitchen door, where he was clubbed down again. Either Tiloukaikt or Tomahas jammed a rifle muzzle against his throat and pulled the trigger. Narcissa ran forward and with the help of some other women dragged Marcus back through the kitchen to a settee. She tried to stanch the blood with a towel and ashes from the fireplace, ordered the children to bolt the doors and shutters and hide in closets.

  “Do you know me?” she said to her husband.

  “Yes.” His voice was a whisper.

  “Is there anything I can do to stop the bleeding?”

  “No.”

  Outside, the Cayuse, led by Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, and the half-breed Joe Lewis, had dropped the blankets that hid their rifles. A man named William Marsh was gunned down as he ran from the gristmill; another, Isaac Gilliland, working at his tailor’s table, fought back with an ax long enough for some mission folk to escape before he was cut down; L. W. Saunders, a schoolteacher, was hacked to death while trying to climb a rail fence as his daughter watched from a school window.

  Narcissa walked to the sitting-room window and saw Joe Lewis and the others running amok. “Is it you, Joe, who are doing this?” she cried out. At that moment, a young Cayuse named “Frank” Escaloom fired his rifle into the sitting room, the bullet striking Narcissa under her left arm. She fell but staggered up, helped by the others to a seat while she prayed to God to protect the children.

  As the attackers broke windows and smashed at the door, an immigrant named Andrew Rodgers, wounded in the arm, got the women and children, and one other wounded man, upstairs. There Narcissa was placed on a bed, her blood soaking the blankets. No attempt was made to move Marcus, who lay unconscious on the settee below.

  When the Indians broke into the sitting room Rodgers met them aiming an old rifle he had found. For a time the intruders were cowed. Then Tamsucky, the Cayuse who had attempted to break into Narcissa’s bedroom five years past, promised that no harm would come to the whites if they would surrender. One of the women in the upstairs bedroom recognized Tamsucky as the man who had killed L. W. Saunders and warned the others, but they had no choice but to descend the stairs and hope for mercy.

  Narcissa, weak from bleeding, was helped down to the sitting room and nearly fainted at the sight of her husband, still lying on the settee, eyes closed, hideously mutilated, breathing stertorously.

  The Indians moved all the captives to the Indian room at the northwest corner of the house and there debated their fate, Tamsucky’s promise forgotten. Eliza Spalding, the daughter Henry had brought only a week before to enroll in school, understood enough of their language to know they were arguing over whether or not to kill all the captives. Finally, their decision was to spare the children and all the women except Narcissa.

  She was carried out on a settee, Andrew Rodgers, despite his wounded arm, lifting one end of it, and the ringleader of the attack, Joe Lewis, the other. Outdoors, Lewis dropped his end of the couch and stood back as several Cayuse opened fire, killing Rodgers and Narcissa Whitman instantly. One Indian stepped forward and slashed Narcissa’s lifeless body with a whip, after which her corpse was dumped into an irrigation ditch.

  Soon after these murders, Frances Sager, who had been hiding in the attic above the schoolroom, came down and was dragged outdoors by Lewis and shot to death. She was the third of four of the Sager orphans killed and the ninth white killed before nightfall.

  Marcus Whitman, mercifully unconscious, died of his wounds in the sitting room.

  Five other Waiilatpu residents would also die, including Helen Meek and Louise Sager, before the end of the siege on December 5.

  The bodies of the Whitmans and Andrew Rodgers lay in the dirt outside the Indian room for nearly three days before the Cayuse would permit them to be buried in a common grave.

  Six men escaped the massacre. One drowned in the Columbia in flight, another, W. D. Canfield, fled on foot to Lapwai, 120 miles northeast, and warned Eliza Spalding of the horrific events at Waiilatpu. She was frantic for the safety of her husband and daughter and sent two Nez Percé men to the Whitman station to do what they could to rescue them.

  Henry Spalding meantime was riding toward Waiilatpu when on the thirtieth he learned of the massacre and that his daughter had survived but was a captive of the Cayuse. He pushed on toward Lapwai—and probably passed without seeing the Nez Percé his wife had sent down on the rescue effort. He rode wildly thirty miles before he fell exhausted from his horse and slept fitfully a short time, during which interval his horse wandered off and he was forced to walk, covering the last ninety miles to Lapwai in six days.

  When he reached the outskirts of his mission, Spalding saw a crowd of Indian looters milling about and believed for an instant that he was gazing upon another Waiilatpu, a scene of murder and perhaps other nameless atrocities. Were either of his Elizas alive? His other children? Had any of his mission workers survived?

  He was rescued from the shock of these thoughts by one of the Nez Percé faithful who told him his wife and the others were safe, that they had taken refuge at the William Craig farm eight miles north. He was reunited with them on December 7, but his mind had been “injured” by the ordeal of the past week, Bancroft states, so much so that “all his subsequent writings show a want of balance.” Thereafter, when relating the events of that experience, “his forehead was covered with great drops of sweat, and his eyes had a frenzied expression.”

  His manner on such occasions was compared to that of Donner party survivors recollecting their winter ordeal at Truckee Lake.

  * * *

  At Waiilatpu, the Cayuse held captive forty-seven whites—thirty-four children, eight women, and five men. Several of the women were “taken for wives” by the Indians, and Spalding later wrote that they were compelled to cook for a large number of the savages and that his daughter Eliza had been forced to taste the food to prove it unpoisoned. The women also sewed garments from goods looted from the mission, and it was reported that the women and girls were subjected to many more “revolting brutalities.”

  On December 19, Peter Ogden, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s finest troubleshooter, a clever and forceful man not unused to or even avoiding violence when he deemed it necessary, arrived at Fort Walla Walla. He gathered the chiefs together and announced, “The company have nothing to do with your quarrel. If you wish it, on my return I will see what can be done for you; but I do not promise to prevent a war. Deliver me the prisoners to return to their friends, and I will pay you a ransom, that is all.”

  The ransom was too alluring to refuse, and in return for $500 worth of shirts, blankets, guns, ammunition, flints, and tobacco provided by the Company, the prisoners were handed over by the Cayuse at Waiilatpu.

  Henry and Eliza Spalding arrived at Fort Walla Walla from the Craig farm on New Year’s Day 1848, with an escort of fifty loyal Nez Percé, and were reunited with their daughter.

  They had closed their mission, taking only a few household goods with them and an inventory for the Board of Missions to employ in making a claim for government restitution. Spalding listed eleven buildings, 100 head of cattle, thirty-nine horses, thirty-one hogs, two wagons, a carriage, two carts, a feather bed, two rocking chairs, four settees, two spinning wheels, fifty-six apple trees, four peach trees, and one pear tree.

  He estimated the property and belongings to be worth $10,048.11. It worked out to $913.46 for each year the unsalaried and unappreciated missionaries had spent at Lapwai.

  24

  Last Trails

  “… THE IMAGE OF AN IRREVOCABLE PAST.”

  1

  In February 1848 Joe Meek, the big, shag-bearded, good-natured “bull buffalo” mountain man from Virginia, rode into Waiilatpu with an escort of militia men and some pack animals. He was heading out from Oregon City on a mission to deliver certain important pape
rs to President Polk in Washington and wanted to see again the place where so many of his friends had died, and where his daughter had suffered. Helen Meek, “adopted” by the Whitmans and schooled by them at their mission, had died in December, not long after being freed by the Cayuse and delivered with the other captives to Peter Ogden at Fort Walla Walla.

  The ruins of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman’s eleven years of labor and hope lay before him: the burned-out shell of the T-shaped house; piles of melted adobe bricks, charred timbers, lintels, roof beams, and planking; and, littering the grounds, shards of china and pottery, snow-stained books and letters, and the rubble of household items the marauders deemed of no value. All the orchard trees had been hacked down, the fields trampled, and the wolves had been at work among the graves. Gnawed bones and rags of clothing had to be gathered up and reburied. Meek found Narcissa Whitman’s remains and snipped a lock of her hair as a keepsake before placing her in a deeper grave than before.

  As he and his escort rode down to the Umatilla to pick up the Oregon Trail and head east, the Waiilatpu killers remained at large. Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, Joe Lewis, and all the others had vanished. Some said they were still lurking somewhere near their terrible handiwork, and others claimed they had fled into the Blue Mountains. Meek had to contain his great hunger for revenge; he had other work to do, and in any event, the Cayuse’ days on the run were closing. The killers could not stay free long when the countryside was swarming with men hunting them down. He only wished he could be in on the kill.

  He would be, but two and a half years would pass before the raiders, some of them at least, would be brought to justice.

  * * *

  Joe Meek, now thirty-seven and as tough, durable, and dependable as he had been in the days when he headed trapper brigades to rendezvous on the Green River of Wyoming, had been the settlers’ choice to deliver an assortment of petitions and papers to Washington. He had served his offices well from the time of the pioneering governmental meetings at Champoeg in ’43 when he acted as auctioneer of Ewing Young’s estate. He had been the provisional government’s choice for sheriff and later marshal, and for his new assignment had another advantage: He was related to the Childresses, Sara Childress Polk’s people, and might thereby have an entrée to the president that was denied to others.