Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Things got worse before they got better. The caravan had reached Sioux country when several of the travelers came down with cholera. This virulent disease had been unknown in North America, even among whites, before the 1830s. But during the first years of that decade it leapt the Atlantic and swept from Canada down the Atlantic seaboard and over the Appalachians into the Mississippi Valley. The outbreak the American Fur Company caravan encountered was likely a remnant of the initial epidemic, and it hit the caravan hard. “The weather was very warm, and there were showers from day to day,” Parker observed by way of noting circumstances in which the disease commonly spread. Other contributors were the fault of the caravan crew themselves. “The intemperate habits of the men, and their manner of living, probably had a tendency to induce the disease.” Three men died and several others were at death’s door.

  But heaven, and Marcus Whitman, came to the rescue, Parker explained. The sick men survived “through the blessing of God upon the assiduous attentions of Doct. Whitman, my associate, and the free use of powerful medicines.” The cholera outbreak, and the way it ended, might well have spared Parker and Whitman an evil fate. “This afflictive scourge, so far as respected Dr. W. and myself, was providential,” Parker said. “The assistance we rendered the sick, and the medical skill of the Doctor, converted those into permanent friends who had so disliked the restraints which our presence imposed upon them that, as they afterwards confessed, they had plotted our death and intended on the first convenient occasion to put their purpose in execution.”

  Hardly had the caravan survived the cholera when several of its members did something that made Parker wonder who were the civilized and who the savages. “A man by the name of Garrio, a half blood Indian chief of the Arickara nation, was shot under very aggravated circumstances,” Parker wrote. “Garrio and his family were residing in a log cabin on the Papillon River. Six or seven men, half intoxicated, went down to his house in the night, called him up, took him away a half mile, and shot him with six balls, scalped him, and left him unburied. The reason they assigned for doing so was that he was a bad man and had killed white men.”

  Parker didn’t know if this was true, but the presumption of the vigilantes appalled him. “If he was guilty, who authorized them to take his life?” The incident would surely spawn more violence. “The Arickara nation will remember this and probably take revenge on some innocent persons. This, I apprehend, is the way Indian wars are often produced. While we charge the Indians with inveterate ferociousness and inhuman brutality, we forget the too numerous wrongs and outrages committed upon them, which incite them to revenge.”

  THE CARAVAN ASCENDED THE PLATTE AND THEN THE Sweetwater. August brought them to the Continental Divide and the beginning of the Oregon country. They benefited, at two-decades’ remove, from the signal accomplishment of the Astor project, the one great success amid the multiple disappointments and ultimate failure of the grand design. A party of Astorians returning east in 1812 was struggling toward the crest of the Rockies when a Shoshone told them of a better route over the Rockies than those followed by Lewis and Clark and the Astorians themselves when heading west. “Learning that this Indian is perfectly acquainted with the route,” wrote Robert Stuart, the leader of the Astor group, “I without loss of time offered him a pistol, a blanket of blue cloth, an axe, a knife, an awl, a fathom of blue beads, a looking glass and a little powder and ball if he would guide us to the other side, which he immediately accepted.” The Shoshone evidently changed his mind, for two days later he absconded, taking Stuart’s horse with him.

  Yet the hint of an easy pass prompted Stuart and the others to look for it, and with effort they found it. Upon reaching the settlements on the Missouri they shared what they had learned with others, and thereafter the South Pass route became the standard for parties bound for Oregon.

  To most travelers the South Pass seemed scarcely a pass at all. “The passage through these mountains is in a valley so gradual in the ascent and descent that I should not have known we were approaching them had it not been that as we advanced the atmosphere gradually became cooler,” Samuel Parker wrote. The valley varied in width from two to fifteen miles. “Though there are some elevations and depressions in this valley, yet comparatively speaking it is level; and the summit, where the waters divide which flow into the Atlantic and into the Pacific, is about six thousand feet above the level of the ocean.” Parker was mistaken about the elevation, which is closer to 7,500 feet, but he wasn’t wrong in noting that the South Pass made crossing the great range of the American West easier than crossing much smaller ranges in the East.

  TWO DAYS LATER THEY REACHED THE RENDEZVOUS, WHERE Marcus Whitman won additional respect from the mountain men by turning surgeon. He removed an iron arrowhead, three inches long, from the back of Jim Bridger, where it had lodged in a fight with the Blackfeet three years earlier. The extraction was tricky, as the tip of the arrow had bent upon hitting a large bone, and the bent tip acted like a barb, holding the arrow in place. Moreover, cartilage had grown around the arrow. But Bridger wanted it out, and Whitman obliged. “The Doctor pursued the operation with great self-possession and perseverance,” Parker recorded, “and his patient manifested equal firmness. The Indians looked on meanwhile with countenances indicating wonder, and in their own peculiar manner expressed great astonishment when it was extracted.” Whitman’s medical skills would prove both a boon and a bane in his subsequent work with Indians, for now they seemed marvelous. The mountaineers certainly thought so. A second trapper asked to have an arrow removed from his shoulder, and Whitman obliged. Many others queued up for minor surgeries and for medicines for assorted ailments.

  At the rendezvous, Parker and Whitman met Nez Perce and Flathead Indians. The two missionaries referred to the Flathead (or Nez Perce) delegation to St. Louis described in the Christian Advocate, and they said their present journey was a response to the plea of that delegation to learn about the gospel. They asked whether the Indians indeed wished them to come to Oregon and teach them the ways of God. “The oldest chief of the Flatheads arose,” Parker recorded, “and said, ‘he was old, and did not expect to know much more; he was deaf and could not hear, but his heart was made glad, very glad, to see what he had never seen before, a man near to God (meaning a minister of the gospel).’” The principal chief of the Nez Perce spoke in a similar vein. “He had heard from white men a little about God, which had only gone into his ears; he wished to know enough to have it go down into his heart, to influence his life, and teach his people.”

  Parker drew the crucial, and welcome, conclusion: “The Nez Perces and Flathead Indians present a promising field for missionary labor, white for the harvest, and the indications of divine providence in regard to it are made plain by their anxiety to obtain Christian knowledge.” Parker and Whitman decided that their first mission in Oregon must be among these peoples.

  So encouraged were the two missionaries that they decided that Whitman should return east at once and gather associates and supplies for a full-fledged expedition to Oregon the following year. Leaving Parker to continue the reconnaissance, Whitman again joined the fur company caravan when, having exchanged its provisions for furs, it retraced the route over South Pass and down the Missouri to St. Louis. The caravan reached that city in early November. Whitman continued east to New York, arriving home in December.

  18

  FEMALES WANTED

  MORE THAN EAGERNESS TO SAVE SOULS HASTENED Marcus Whitman on his return. Love provided an equal spur, for he was about to be married. Narcissa Prentiss, his fiancée, was living in Amity, New York, not far from Whitman’s Wheeler. Unmarried at twenty-six, Narcissa was almost a spinster by the standards of her day. Yet she was not without suitors, including one Henry Spalding, whose proposal of marriage she rejected. Spalding, a proud man, took the rejection hard, to Narcissa’s dismay.

  She decided Whitman was more to her liking. He was also essential to some life plans she was just then formulating.
Narcissa had attended a talk by Samuel Parker similar to that in which Parker had won Whitman to the cause of an Oregon mission. Parker’s effect on Narcissa was almost identical. She had been “saved” but was seeking an outlet for her energy and devotion. She had taught school but was weary of the classroom. She desired something more. “Is there a place for an unmarried female in my Lord’s vineyard?” she asked Parker after the lecture.

  Parker said he didn’t know but would check. “Are females wanted?” he wrote the American Mission Board. “A Miss Narcissa Prentiss of Amity is very anxious to go to the heathen. Her education is good—piety conspicuous—her influence is good. She will offer herself if needed.”

  The board replied that unmarried women were not wanted. Married women, yes; unmarried women, no. Married couples were the model missionaries, and the board would stick with the model.

  If Narcissa was discouraged by the reply, she didn’t stay discouraged long. Instead she addressed her deficiency by becoming engaged to Marcus Whitman, six years her elder. Whitman visited friends in Amity in 1835 prior to his western reconnaissance with Parker. The friends knew Narcissa and were aware of her interest in missionary work, and introductions were made. Before Whitman’s visit ended, he and Narcissa had reached an understanding that they would become the model couple the mission board wanted.

  They might well have concluded that it was a match made in heaven. They were, after all, embarking on heaven’s work. Was it also a meeting of the hearts? Not at first. “We had to make love somewhat abruptly and must do our courtship now we are married,” Narcissa wrote to Parker’s wife not long after she and Whitman were wed. But in an age when the practicalities of marriage were often considered as important as its romantic elements, this ordering was not unusual. They were married; they would learn to love each other.

  AND THEY WOULD DO SO IN THE FACE OF CHALLENGES NOT confronting most newlyweds. Narcissa and Marcus Whitman traveled by steamboat to Cincinnati, where they were joined by Henry and Eliza Spalding. Henry had rebounded from Narcissa’s spurning sufficiently to find a wife. Like Marcus and Narcissa, Henry and Eliza were fired by zeal to convert the Indians of Oregon. The mission board judged that two couples would do better than one on the western frontier and sent them out together. The board didn’t know the background between Henry Spalding and Narcissa, and neither, apparently, did Marcus Whitman or Eliza Spalding. Henry Spalding and Narcissa Whitman seem not to have spoken of it, and Narcissa’s letters and journal suggest she thought the ill feelings were in the past.

  They continued by steamboat to Liberty, Missouri, where they prepared for the overland journey. Like Marcus Whitman the previous year, the foursome would join the annual caravan of the American Fur Company. But this time they would go all the way to Oregon, and they purchased provisions accordingly. They bought flour, salt and other foodstuffs they couldn’t procure by hunting, fishing or trading along the way; trade goods for bartering with the Indians; seeds and equipment for starting a farm in Oregon; tools of various sorts; medical supplies; furniture and bedding; clothing and shoes; books and writing materials; guns, powder and lead. They bought the all-important wagons, a heavy one and a lighter one, which would carry the supplies and the women. They bought horses and mules to ride and to pull the wagons, and four saddles. The women’s were side-saddles, considered appropriate for the demure sex when they chose to ride. They bought seventeen cattle, including four dairy cows, to stock the Oregon farm.

  Marcus Whitman had known he would pay a frontier premium for all this, but the total bill shocked him. “Our expenses here have been much worse than I expected,” he wrote to the mission board. “Horses and cattle cost over $1,000.00.” But prices would only get higher—much higher for some items—farther west, and so he paid what the sellers demanded.

  At Liberty the Whitmans and Spaldings were joined by another New Yorker, William Gray. The mission board had appointed him as a “secular agent”: an all-purpose laborer and craftsman who would do or oversee much of the physical work of building houses, barns, fences, coops and sties when the missionaries got to Oregon. Whitman himself secured the services of two men to help with the animals and the setting up and breaking down of camp on the trail. Also traveling with the group were a pair of Nez Perce boys who had accompanied Whitman east the previous year to learn English and see how the white people lived. Their fathers had let them go after receiving Whitman’s assurance that he would return them the following year, as he was now doing. A third Nez Perce, who had traveled east on his own and wanted to return to his home country, completed the entourage.

  THE GREEN RIVER WAS AGAIN THE SITE OF THE ANNUAL RENDEZVOUS. William Gray marveled at what he saw. “We will pass through this city of about fifteen hundred inhabitants—composed of all classes and conditions of men, and on this occasion two classes of women—starting from a square log pen 18 by 18, with no doors, except two logs that had been cut so as to leave a space about feet from the ground two feet wide and six feet long, designed for an entrance, as also a place to hand out goods and take in furs,” Gray wrote. “It was covered with poles, brush on top of the poles; in case of rain, which we had twice during our stay at the rendezvous, the goods were covered with canvas, or tents thrown over them. Lumber being scarce in that vicinity, floors, doors, as well as sash and glass, were dispensed with. The spaces between the logs were sufficient to admit all the light requisite to do business in this primitive store.” The trading hut stood a modest distance from the Green River, and the tents, saddles and paraphernalia of the fur company and its men formed two lines that ran down to the river. The lines of the tents, together with the river and the hut, set the boundaries of an area into which the company’s horses and mules might be driven and be defended in case of Indian attack.

  West of the fur company’s camp was the camp of the hunters and trappers who came to the rendezvous to renew their supplies and acquaintances. East of the company’s camp was the camp of the missionary group. A mile away, up Horse Creek, which entered the Green River just below the fur company camp, began the camps of various Indian tribes: Bannocks, Snakes, Flatheads and Nez Perces. These camps were similarly designed for defense, for though the tribes were at peace at the time of the rendezvous, none let down their guard. “The whole city was a military camp,” Gray wrote. “Every little camp had its own guards to protect its occupants and property from being stolen by its neighbor. The arrow or the ball decided any dispute that might occur. The only law known for horse-stealing was death to the thief, if the owner or the guard could kill him in the act. If he succeeded in escaping, the only remedy for the man who lost his horse was to buy, or steal another and take his chances in escaping the arrow or ball of the owner or guard. It was quite fashionable in this city for all to go well armed, as the best and quickest shot gained the case in dispute.”

  The rendezvous began in earnest with the arrival of the fur company caravan, which was the raison d’être of the gathering. The Indians celebrated the arrival with a dramatic procession through the temporary city. “The Nez Perces and Flatheads, passing from their camps down the Horse Creek, joined the Snake and Bannock warriors, all dressed and painted in their gayest uniforms, each having a company of warriors in war garb, that is, naked, except a single cloth, and painted, carrying their war weapons, bearing their war emblems and Indian implements of music, such as skins drawn over hoops with rattles and trinkets to make a noise,” Gray recalled. He and the Whitmans and Spaldings were alarmed. “When the cavalcade, amounting to full five (some said six) hundred Indian warriors (though I noticed quite a number of native belles covered with beads), commenced coming up through the plain in sight of our camps, those of us who were not informed as to the object or design of this demonstration began to look at our weapons and calculate on a desperate fight.” They drove their horses, mules and cows into an area they thought they could defend and turned their guns outward. But veterans of the rendezvous laughingly explained that this was just for show. Gray adduc
ed evidence on his own: “From the fact that no scalps were borne in the procession, I concluded this must be entirely a peace performance, and gotten up for the occasion.”

  The performance was especially spirited on the part of the Nez Perce, who had learned that the fur company caravan was accompanied by the missionaries, including the two women. The Nez Perce were delighted by this response to their entreaties and were fascinated by the white women, who looked out on the procession from the door of their tent. “The Indians would pass and repass the tent, to get a sight of the two women belonging to the white men,” Gray recorded. In short order the Nez Perce became particularly enamored of Eliza Spalding, who learned their language with surprising speed. Narcissa Whitman was less adept with languages and made less effort.

  NARCISSA WAS DISTRACTED BY FREQUENT CALLERS FROM THE camp of the mountain men. “Among these veteran Rocky Mountain hunters was a tall man, with long black hair, smooth face, dark eyes (inclining to turn his head a little to one side, as much as to say, ‘I can tell you all about it’), a harum-scarum, don’t-care sort of a man, full of ‘life and fun in the mountains,’ as he expressed it,” Gray wrote. Gray didn’t know this man, but it was Joe Meek. “He came and paid his respects to the ladies, and said he had been in the mountains several years; he had not seen a white woman for so long he had almost forgotten how they looked.” Narcissa discovered Meek’s penchant for telling stories. “Mrs. Whitman asked him if he ever had any difficulty or fights with the Indians,” Gray recounted. “‘That we did,’ said he. ‘One time I was with Bridger’s camp; we were traveling along that day, and the Blackfeet came upon us. I was riding an old mule. The Indians were discovered some distance off, so all the party put whip to their horses and started to get to a place where we could defend ourselves. My old mule was determined not to move, with all the beating I could give her, so I sung out to the boys to stop and fight the Indians where we were; they kept on, however. Soon, my old mule got sight of the Blackfeet coming; she pricked up her ears, and on she went like a streak, passed the boys, and away we went. I sung out to the boys, as I passed, “Come on, boys, there is no use to stop and fight the Indians here.”’”