Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

He died in Cambridge on August 31, 1856.

  Bancroft memorialized Wyeth by writing that “The flag of the United States was planted by him simultaneously in the heart of the continent and on the seaboard of the Pacific. He it was who, more directly than any other man, marked the way for the ox-teams which were so shortly to bring the Americanized civilization of Europe across the roadless continent.”

  PART FOUR

  OUT TO ARCADIA

  14

  The Macedonian Cry

  “WATCHMAN, TELL US OF THE NIGHT…”

  1

  The story of the Indians who came to William Clark’s home in Saint Louis to find out about the white man’s Book of Heaven created many an armchair dream among readers of the Christian Advocate and Journal. Pious imaginings of taking leave of cozy hearthfires and braving the rigors of the wilderness were commonplace, many listened when the Advocate editor wrote “Hear! Hear! Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky Mountains?”, and many read every stirring word of the Advocate article by Dr. Wilbur Fisk, the celebrated divine, educator, and founder of Wesleyan College in Middletown, Connecticut. He wrote: “Let two suitable men, unincumbered with families, possessing the spirit of martyrs, throw themselves into the [Indian] nation—live with them—learn their language—preach Christ to them.… Who will go? Who? Were I young, healthy, and unincumbered, how joyfully I would go! But the honor is for another. Bright will be his crown, glorious his reward.”

  Marcus Whitman, like Jason Lee, never seems to have hesitated to respond; indeed, when the idea came to him, probably through the writings of Fisk, Hall Kelley, and Lee, he would not be denied. In 1834, when he made a fervent application to the American Board of Foreign Missions in Boston for an assignment in the Oregon Country, he was thirty-two years old and still searching for his life’s niche. His parents, descendants of colonial New Englanders, were citizens of Rushville, New York, where Marcus was born, and provided him with a comfortable Congregationalist upbringing and a good education. In his twenties he turned to medicine, riding the lumber camps of western New York state as a physician’s apprentice. He studied for two sixteen-week terms at a medical school in Ohio and received an M.D. degree in 1831, but he was not fulfilled by buggy travel over the back roads of New York state lancing boils, splinting broken limbs, and tending to sick, wounded, and dying farm folk. Nor was he satisfied by Sunday school and temperence teaching or the sweaty labor at the sawmill he operated with his brother in Rushville. All he learned seemed destined for some higher purpose, and when he asked to be sent to Oregon he listed his qualifications—“physician, teacher, or agriculturist”—and hoped one or more of these valuable skills would earn him an assignment.

  The Mission Board clearly liked his application. Here was a man in the prime of his life, from a good and Godly family, a physician and a teacher. He had an excellent church record. He was unmarried. If Whitman made a personal appearance before the committee he would have impressed them the more. He fairly radiated energy, enthusiasm, and bonhomie. He was of medium height, thin but sinewy, with big but not unhandsome facial features, iron-gray short-cropped hair, muttonchop whiskers, and deep-blue, soul-searching eyes. His habitual slovenliness of dress and outspokenness the members would have dismissed as the products of an outdoorsman’s life. This was a man who had bent his back in physical labor, not in hovering over a desk and paperwork. He had what the Boston mission people imagined were the characteristics of a real “Western man,” no actual specimen of which they had ever really seen.

  He had but one serious drawback, his lack of divinity training, and on this basis he was initially rejected as a missionary. Formal Christian religious training, it was felt, was absolutely necessary if one were to preach, teach, and proselytize among savage races. But Whitman’s application came at a propitious time: The Mission Board had been studying the feasibility of opening an Oregon mission and had commissioned a seasoned Presbyterian divine, Reverend Samuel Parker, to make an overland tour of the “Flathead country” beyond the Rocky Mountains and report on potential mission sites. Parker had been to Saint Louis once before, in the spring of 1834, six weeks after Jason Lee and his Methodists had departed with a fur caravan for the frontier. He ran out of money and was forced to return home, but he was regarded as a veteran trailsman, and Whitman, distressed at his rejection, was thrilled when he received notification from the board that he could accompany Parker to the Oregon Country as physician-missionary.

  Theirs was a strange pairing; they seemed to have only their religious zeal in common. Parker, born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, held degrees in theology from Williams College and the Andover Theological Seminary and had been ordained a Congregational minister in 1812. At the time of his commission, the fifty-five-year-old church wheelhorse was working as a teacher in a girls’ school in Ithaca, and had a reputation for erudite oratory and a much-appreciated talent for fund-raising. He was handsome, prim, mannered, fastidious, and authoritarian—never a man to be called “Sam”—the very picture of the studious, sedentary preacher. He was perceived as having forceful leadership qualities, a physical vitality, a scientific and linguistic bent, and a churchly dignity and flintiness that would serve well in a wilderness setting.

  For all their differences, Whitman was beholden to Reverend Parker for speaking on his behalf to the board—and for being the instrument by which Marcus met the woman of his dreams.

  In November 1834 Parker made a speech at a small Congregational church in Amity, in Allegany County, New York, on the need for missionaries to serve among the savage tribes of the far West. In the audience sat a particularly enthralled young woman named Narcissa Prentiss who, after hearing his sermon, sought out the visiting theologian. She was twenty-six at the time, tall, golden-haired, “buxom,” a contemporary said of her, and “symetrically formed,” with a strikingly pretty oval face. She made a good impression on Parker, especially after he learned her unusual history.

  The third of nine children of Stephen and Clarissa Ward Prentiss, Narcissa (named after the amaryllis-like flower) was born in Prattsburg and afforded a formal education unusual for a young female of the era. Her father, a fourth-generation descendant of a Massachusetts Bay colonizer, had made a prosperous business as a builder and was respectfully called “Judge” Prentiss for the single term he served as a probate court magistrate. He and his wife were devout in their Congregational religion and devoted to the idea that a good education leavened, rather than diminished, the Christian faith. As a teenager, Narcissa, third of the nine Prentiss children, was sent off to the Academy for Women in Troy, and later came home to Prattsburg to attend Franklin Academy, a coeducational religious school her father had helped endow.

  (In the course of her studies at Franklin, Narcissa met a polite, broodingly serious theology student named Henry Harmon Spalding, who was bowled over by her good looks and vivacity and startled by her honest humor. Some of these attributes were considered suspect by the gravely pious of the 1830s, people who, in Henry L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism, seemed to have “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.” Spalding was smitten but mistook Narcissa’s naturally gregarious, friendly nature for affection, and when he made a sudden proposal of marriage she gently turned him down.)

  After graduating from Franklin Academy, Narcissa and one of her sisters opened a kindergarten in the town of Bath, but she felt she was merely marking time and must have conveyed her frustration to Samuel Parker, a man preparing to embark on a great, meaningful journey of faith, one she had dreamed of all her life, to Christianize Indians. She had studied assiduously the Missionary Herald, organ of the Presbyterian Congregational and Dutch Reformed Churches, and the Methodist Christian Advocate. She had been utterly captivated by the story of the Flathead and Nez Percé supplicants in Saint Louis, the accounts of Jason Lee’s mission to the Columbia, and had what the religious journals called “the Macedonian Cry”1 echoing in her brain.

  Samuel Parker was won over by Narciss
a’s ardor to be of service “among the savage races” and in a communication to the Mission Board wrote, “Are females wanted? A Miss Prentiss … is very anxious to go to the heathen.… Her education is good, her piety conspicuous, her influence good. She will offer herself if needed.” He understood that she could not accompany his quick exploratory journey but hoped she might be a part of some actual mission party in the future.

  Having performed one signal service each to Marcus Whitman and Miss Prentiss, Parker may have even brought the two anxious evangelists together.

  Toward the end of 1834, Whitman, then practicing medicine in the town of Wheeler, a short distance south of Prattsburg, met Narcissa Prentiss. He doubtlessly learned of her ambition to serve in the Oregon Country through Parker. Whatever the occasion of their meeting, he fell in love with her in the moment and let her know his feelings. She no doubt was gracious and appreciative of the sentiment, but sudden professions of love, as in the case of Henry Spalding of sad and recent memory, made her cautious. She found Whitman curiously attractive—rugged, honest, forthright, rather charming in his awkwardness—and could imagine their doing God’s work together in the wilderness. He was a man a woman could learn to love.

  In January 1835 Whitman presented himself to the Prentiss family, then living in Amity, and there he and Narcissa made a pact before he set out for Saint Louis ahead of Samuel Parker. The arrangement seems to have been a betrothal of sorts.

  In February, as Whitman was en route to the Mississippi, Narcissa made a formal application to the Mission Board for service among the Indians of the far West. Her bid was enthusiastically endorsed by the pastor of her church in Amity. Reverend Oliver S. Powell and his wife were making plans of their own for a mission in the Flathead country and hoped to have Miss Prentiss accompany them. He wrote to the board, “I am happy in the prospect of having so efficient a fellow-laborer in the missionary service,” then gave a clue as to the arrangement his parishioner had recently made: “As it is probable that Miss Prentiss will hereafter become the companion of Doctor Marcus Whitman (should he be established as missionary beyond the Rocky Mountains), it may be proper to add that he expressed a desire that she might accompany us on our mission.”

  Narcissa’s application was accepted by the board in March 1835, but because the Powells were unable to carry out their expedition plans, she had to wait. Marcus had departed for Saint Louis ahead of Reverend Parker, and it would be many months, perhaps a year or more, before he returned for her.

  2

  Samuel Parker left Ithaca on March 14, 1835, and reached Saint Louis three weeks later via Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cincinnati, and Louisville, staying with church families, distributing tracts, holding services in the ladies’ cabins of steamers, talking to whoever would listen about his forthcoming journey.

  Whitman was awaiting him and had made preliminary arrangements with the help of local churchmen to attach Parker and himself to a party of trappers heading up the Missouri to the summer rendezvous on the Green River. Leading the brigade was a capable if somewhat boozy trader named Lucien Fontenelle. This man, a Louisianan, had twenty years’ experience trapping along the Missouri and in the Rockies; skirmishing with Blackfeet, Snake and Crow horse raiders; and confronting Hudson’s Bay agents over “rights” to certain rich beaver streams. He was not enamored of the idea of escorting church folk to rendezvous, but he was persuaded, probably by Whitman, who could be quite persuasive.

  They traveled upriver by steamer to Liberty, the Missouri frontier town just above Independence, and were delayed there three weeks. Fontenelle used the time to enlarge his trapping party to fifty men and put together a pack train of horses and mules, three yoke of oxen, and six light wagons. The wagons were to carry trade goods and supplies to rendezvous and furs and buffalo hides (which were fetching more on the market than beaver hides) back to Missouri. Parker and Whitman occupied themselves by visiting a nearby Mormon settlement and riding “twenty miles out of the United States” to Cantonment Leavenworth in Kansas, where Parker preached to the garrison.

  At first, Fontenelle and his rough-hewn mountaineers treated both New Yorkers with contempt. Parker in particular seemed an easy target for their sneers. To the filthy, foul-mouthed, buckskinned trappers sucking their pipes at the campfires the reverend cut a comic figure in his plug hat, black suit, white neck stock, and nose-in-the-air manner. He seemed to think he was in charge of the expedition, and it was galling to watch him standing aloof and unhelpful, never bending his back to any camp labor, parceling out chores to his companion then finding fault with everything done, including the doctor’s “unskillful management” of their horses and the single mule they had purchased in Liberty. Whitman took everything in stride. He felt fortunate to be at the brigade camp waiting to jump off into savage lands, soon to see the Indian country of the Upper Missouri, the great Shining Mountains, and the mysteries that lay beyond them. He was learning from Fontenelle and his men, felt he was fulfilling his destiny, knew that he would be useful.

  Whitman’s utility was proven sooner than he expected. The caravan departed Liberty on May 15 and made its way upriver to Council Bluffs, crossed the Missouri in bull boats, and camped at Bellevue, a few miles below Omaha. There in the rain-soaked bottomlands Fontenelle and several of his men fell ill with cholera. The Asiatic strain of the disease had ravaged Europe in the 1830s and came to America on passenger ships, struck the Eastern Seaboard (killing 3,000 people in New York City alone), and spread inland, thriving in crowded campgrounds amid fetid sloughs of garbage and the excrement of men and animals. Whitman knew the awful symptoms of the disease: the clayey appearance of the skin, bluing of fingernails and face, the violent diarrhetic attacks, ceaseless vomiting and sweating (cholera killed by dehydrating its victims), and had treated it with the accepted remedies of the day and with the same mixed results. Many died of it, some recovered, some never contracted it even in the most plagued areas.

  He took charge of the stricken, administered the recommended apothecary doses of sixty drops of laudanum in half a glass of cold water followed by thirty more drops every half hour. He prepared clysters (medicinal enemas) by mixing three teaspoonfuls of laudanum in a thin, warm gruel, and mustard poultices, and cold cloths to bathe foreheads and limbs. He bled his patients, and purged them with tepid water and salt, or with ipecacuanha. He also recommended that the camp be moved from riverside to higher ground, and this was done. Three men died of the disease but Fontenelle and several others recovered, and Whitman’s labors earned him the respect of the brigade, a reputation that preceded him as the caravan moved west to Grand Island to pick up the Platte and follow it across Nebraska.

  At Fort Laramie, Fontenelle turned over the brigade to his partner Tom Fitzpatrick, who would lead it to the rendezvous. From the white-haired, Irish-born mountain man Samuel Parker and especially Marcus Whitman got a wilderness education. “Broken Hand” had twenty years in the Indian trade. He had been with Ashley in 1823 and, of more interest to the New Yorkers, had traded among the Flathead people northwest of the Rockies. He was wise, patient, and admired; the churchmen questioned him incessantly. Whitman had heard of Captain Bonneville’s party taking a number of freight wagons across the Continental Divide and South Pass to the Green River just three years past and quizzed the guide on the feasibility of emigrant wagons making their way across the mountains to the Oregon Country. On this matter Fitzpatrick was not sanguine, but his doubts did not dampen Whitman’s enthusiasm on the subject. He studied the fur traders’ wagons and felt that similar conveyances were the key to success in establishing missions in the far West, and to attracting families of settlers who would set up their households in the wilderness.

  Samuel Parker had a moment of triumph at Fort Laramie in late July when a band of Oglala stood in silence while he, with his plug hat clapped across his heart, preached to them and sang “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night.” He told Whitman the Indians had asked for an encore and noted in his journal that “t
he expression on their countenances seemed to say, we want to know what all this means.”

  Fitzpatrick, true to his wagon doubts, left them behind at Fort Laramie and had all the equipment, provisions, and trade goods packed on horses and mules. Thus unencumbered, he led his party westward to the Wind River Range and South Pass, arriving there on August 10, and a week later at the Green River rendezvous.

  The churchmen were wide-eyed in wonderment during the week they spent with the traders and trappers, and particularly among the Indian lodges crowding the hillsides along the river. Parker expressed disappointment that the Flatheads and Nez Percé appeared to have neither flat heads nor pierced noses, but his wanderings among them, and among the Arapaho and Sioux camps, convinced him that they were all conducive, if not eager, to receive the Word. Whitman, naturally sociable, enjoyed the friendship of Fitzpatrick’s trapper-trader comrades, many of whom had heard of his good work among the cholera victims at Bellevue camp and sought him out for medical advice. One who came forward was the mountain man Jim Bridger, who was bothered by a Blackfeet arrowhead he had carried in his back for many years, the point now embedded in bone with cartilage grown around it. Whitman deftly extracted it without anesthetic (except for whatever whiskey Bridger took internally beforehand) in front of a crowd of mountaineers and Indians, and when he expressed amazement that the wound had not festered, Bridger opined, “Meat don’t spoil in the Rockies.”

  The missionaries picked up heartening news from soldier-hunter William Drummond Stewart of Perthshire, Scotland, who was traveling with Fitzpatrick’s trappers. He was an experienced rendezvous hand who had shot game all the way to Fort Vancouver with Jason Lee’s party the previous year and told Whitman and Parker that Lee had set up his mission on the Willamette and had thus bypassed Flathead country. The field among this tribe was still open.