Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Whitman also met Bridger’s friend Kit Carson at the rendezvous and may have witnessed, or at least been nearby during, one of the most celebrated episodes in Carson’s colorful career, a favorite of dime-novel writers ever after. Fitzpatrick, Bridger, and other traders had set up their camp adjacent to an Arapaho village, and as the days passed Kit’s eye is said to have fallen on an Arapaho girl named Waa-nibe and he went so far as to make a preliminary courtship present of powder and ball to her father. Accounts vary widely on precisely what happened after this, but it appears that in the camp was a French trapper named Shunar (or Chouinard or Shunan), a huge, bullying drunk much disposed to ragging and threatening the Americans. One of Carson’s biographers claims that Shunar insulted or tried to rape the Arapaho girl and that Kit confronted the Frenchman, a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, in his lair.

  Most sources agree on the result of the challenge. Both men fetched their sidearms and horses and rode up to one another. Both guns were fired simultaneously; Shunar’s wrist was shattered by Kit’s bullet, and Kit’s hair was “parted” by Shunar’s shot and his face burned by the powder.

  Carson “married” Waa-nibe before the rendezvous ended.

  3

  The Green River turned out to be the temporary end of the trail for Marcus Whitman. While Parker was to proceed to the Columbia River with a number of Flathead and Nez Percé guides to scout mission sites, Whitman would return east for “reinforcements,” Narcissa Prentiss among them. A year hence, he would return to the rendezvous and reunite with Parker, who would come out from Fort Vancouver to the Green to intercept him. The plan may have been agreed upon during the course of the journey out of Saint Louis, but the clear motive for it was that the two men were becoming alienated. The minister was not a compatible companion for Whitman or anyone else, and Parker’s conduct at their separation makes Bancroft’s assessment—“it is most probable that the want of congeniality made it acceptable to both of them”—seem excessively euphemistic: The reverend appropriated their mule and the others purchased en route and gave Whitman five dollars to buy a horse for himself. Since horses were selling for a minimum of seventy-five dollars at the rendezvous, Whitman dug deep and scraped up enough to buy a scrawny animal—“a disgrace to any man to pack on account of his extreme sore back,” he said—and hired two men, one to act as interpreter and guide, the other to cook and mind the horse, each to be paid eighteen dollars for the two months they were to serve him.

  On August 22, 1835, Parker accompanied Jim Bridger and sixty men riding out from the Green River to Pierre’s Hole at the headwaters of the Snake. There the trappers took a course toward Blackfeet country and left Parker with his escort of ten Nez Percé to proceed to the Oregon Country. The reverend suffered greatly in the Salmon River mountains, weakened and dizzy with fever, but heroically pushed on, falling from his saddle at day’s end, often unable to eat and with barely enough strength to bleed himself, as he’d been taught by Doctor Whitman, add new pages in shaky hand in his journal by campfire light, and crawl into his blankets. By late September, when he and his Nez Percé escort crossed the Salmon and climbed the Kooskooskie (Clearwater) range, he found his health improving in the “wild, cold mountains” and his strength regained by the time he reached Fort Walla Walla on October 6.

  Parker rested two days among Hudson’s Bay people, then with three husky Walla Walla Indians embarked by Company canoe on the Columbia. He visited a Cayuse village on the south side of the river, and on the twelfth, near The Dalles rapids, met Nathaniel Wyeth, the one-time ice merchant then en route to his fort on the Portneuf River, and home.

  Parker reached Fort Vancouver on October 29, 1835, and spent the winter enjoying John McLoughlin’s hospitality and “the society of gentlemen, enlightened, polished, and sociable.” He was provided half of a newly built and furnished house, dined with the factor, was given books from McLoughlin’s library and horses to explore the Oregon coast and Willamette valley. He met and was greatly impressed by Jason Lee and the Methodist minister’s mission house and gardens on the east side of the Willamette River. He especially admired Lee’s work in setting up a temperance society, and if he experienced any disappointment as Lee’s guest, it was upon learning that the sheer physical labors of building and maintaining a mission had kept the minister from attending to his spiritual work. In any event, Lee told the chagrined Parker, Christianizing the savages was exasperating, impossible work, and he had written his superiors that “we have no evidence that we have been instrumental in the conversion of one soul.”

  Parker shared with Lee the conviction that more women were needed in the Oregon Country and endorsed the idea contained in a letter Lee had written home in March 1835: “I have requested the Board not to send any more single men, but to send men with families.… A greater favor could not be bestowed upon this country than to send to it pious, industrious, intelligent females.” Parker later wrote, “Christian white women are very much needed to exert influence over Indian families.” Clearly they had differences on the issue: Lee wrote more as a settler than a missionary; Parker’s only interest was Christianizing Indians.

  On April 14, 1836, the reverend bade farewell to McLoughlin and Fort Vancouver. He planned to explore the Upper Columbia, scout sites for mission stations, then, with his Nez Percé as guides, move on to the Green River for the summer rendezvous. There he expected to meet with Marcus Whitman and whatever party his erstwhile partner was able to organize in the East.

  Parker reached Walla Walla on the twenty-sixth and remained there two weeks, preaching to a number of Nez Percé and Cayuse Indians who came to the fort and learning firsthand what Jason Lee meant about the frustrations of converting the savages. The Cayuse chief could not accept that doctrine of monogamous marriage as the Nez Percé people seemed willing to do, explaining to the missionary that he could not dispense with any of his wives, was too old to turn away from the ways of his people, and preferred “the place of burning” if that was the only recourse.

  On May 9 Parker set out for the Green with his Nez Percé faithful. He dreaded taking the terrible Salmon River Mountain route to the rendezvous site—he had narrowly escaped dying there the year before. He tried to persuade his escort to take the Grande Ronde and Snake River route, but the Indians preferred the Salmon since it avoided hostile Blackfeet country, and they could not be persuaded otherwise. Parker may have fallen ill again on the trail, or he may have had a change of heart about returning east over such arduous country, for he sent letters ahead addressed to Whitman, then turned back to the Columbia to await a merchant ship that would take him home.

  He scouted mission station sites on the return to Fort Vancouver and was particularly enamored of a spot twenty-two miles from Fort Walla Walla near the mouth of a small stream and in a pretty valley amidst high rolling hills covered with dark green grass. The Cayuse people, in whose country it was located, called it Waiilatpu, “Place of the Rye Grass.”

  He traveled as far north as Fort Colville, the northernmost Company post on the Walla Walla River, and preached among the Palouses, a people related to the Nez Percé, and the Spokanes. He explored the Spokane River and made extensive notes in his journal in which he envisioned a mission that would minister to the Nez Percé, Palouse, Spokane, Coeur d’Alêne, Pend d’Oreille, and Shuyelpi tribes.

  Parker returned to Fort Vancouver in early June and found the Hudson’s Bay Company’s new steamship Beaver recently arrived on the coast from England. A sidewheeler of 110 tons with a crew of thirty and armed with four six-pounder cannons, the Beaver was the first steam-powered vessel to reach the Pacific coast. Parker booked passage on the steamer and on June 18, 1836, embarked for Honolulu and New York.

  He reached home on May 23, 1837, and calculated that he had traveled 28,000 miles, counting his sea voyage, in the twenty-six months that had passed since he set out for Saint Louis. In 1838 he published in Ithaca his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains, the first detailed
account of the Oregon Country and its Indian tribes since Lewis and Clark’s journals and the miscellaneous writings of Hall Kelley. The volume was immensely popular, selling 10,000 copies.

  In the book Parker mused “upon the probable changes which would take place in these remote regions in a very few years” and told of his dream of “a new empire to be added to the kingdoms of the earth.”

  4

  His unhappy experiences with Samuel Parker forgotten, Marcus Whitman returned to New York anxious to tell of his adventures on the trail from the Missouri frontier to the trappers’ rendezvous on the Green River. He wanted nothing more than to marry Miss Prentiss and return west and conveyed both these ambitions to the Board of Missions. The board members were impressed by the report he made to them and by the two Nez Percé boys, Tackitooits and Ais—their Christianized names Richard and John—he brought home with him. There remained a stumbling block. The board was satisfied with Whitman’s plans for the return journey: using wagons at least as far as Fort Laramie, having a small cattle herd to supplement whatever game they were able to kill en route, purchasing horses, pack animals, flour, and similar stores from Missouri outfitters. But the unresolved question had to do with the non-negotiable requirement that an ordained minister must accompany his party. Whitman was a mere physician, after all, and did not have the requisite training to elevate the heathen heavenward.

  For the doctor, everything hung in the balance. If a certified church servant did not accompany him, there would be no mission; if there was to be no mission, Miss Prentiss would not marry him—such was their agreement—and his life would fall in a shambles. He sought her out in Amity and learned that she was aware of the problem, and had even thought about prospective ministerial candidates for the mission. She had reluctantly landed on the name Henry Harmon Spalding, a man she suspected was embittered and probably vindictive over her rebuffing his marriage proposal when they were classmates at Franklin Academy in Prattsburg in 1828.

  Spalding, now thirty-two and as gloomily pensive as ever, was only recently returned to New York from Missouri, where he and his wife had conducted mission work among the Osage Indians. He had not forgotten Narcissa’s rejection; indeed he seemed still to be nursing the wound and wondering about her motives in declining the offer of such a prize catch, as he wrote the board that he did not wish to travel to Oregon with her: “I do not want to go into the same mission with Narcissa,” he said cryptically, “as I question her judgement.”

  But after receiving certain assurances from the board, perhaps that he would be “senior” in the expedition, perhaps that in Oregon he would have a separate station from the Whitmans, he was persuaded to reconsider and even paid a courtesy call to the Prentiss family in Angelica a few days before Narcissa’s wedding.

  Soon after his rebuff by Miss Prentiss, Spalding had married Eliza Hart, the daughter of an Oneida County, New York, farmer. She was described by Bancroft as “a tall, slender, plain, dark woman, sympathizing, and faithful” who “won the confidence of all about her.” What she lacked in personal charms, he said, “she made up in the excellence of her character, taking for her own standard that of the highest in pious life.” She was a talented artist and linguist, a frail and shy spinster when she fell in love with Spalding and his missionary dreams through the correspondence they conducted during his theological studies. She waited patiently while he completed his preliminary degree work, and the two married while he was attending a seminary in Cincinnati, she taking in boarders to supplement their meager income. Spalding, in his limitless capacity for caddish expression, wrote the Mission Board that he had married Eliza “for the express purpose of giving my wife the opportunity of pursuing the same Theological studies as myself.”

  After completing his studies, the couple returned to Utica to await the birth of their first child and a response from the Mission Board to Spalding’s application for a “foreign” appointment. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in the summer of 1835, and in October Eliza’s baby was stillborn. Spalding’s reaction to the tragedy was that “the Lord most righteously chastised us for our sins.” In this he might best have spoken only for himself, for in recommending the couple to the board for a mission appointment, one reference stated that Eliza was beloved by a large circle of friends and was “one of the best women for a missionary wife with whom I am acquainted.” The writer also seemed to know her husband well, stating that Henry Spalding “can turn his hand to almost any kind of handy work, is not remarkable for his judgment and common sense … is sometimes too much inclined to denounce and censure those who are not as zealous and ardent as himself.” The correspondent also used the word jealous to describe the man “so fortunate as to have married Eliza Hart.”

  Eliza and Narcissa were to become friends, but of Spalding Narcissa wrote her father during their journey, “The man who came with us is one who ought never to have come.… My dear husband has suffered more from him in consequence of his wicked jealousy, and great pique towards me, than can be known in this world.”

  They arranged to join forces in Cincinnati.

  * * *

  Marcus Whitman and Narcissa Prentiss married in Angelica, Allegany County, New York, on February 18, 1836, two months after his return from the Rocky Mountains.

  Since much of the courtship had taken place before he left the state the previous year, Whitman had only to make certain she wanted to accompany him to the Oregon Country. He described the rigors of the trail, much of it arduous and dangerous, and reminded her that she would be separated from her family for an indefinite period; indeed, she might never see them again.

  “It is God’s will,” she said. “I will go.”

  She wore a handmade black bombazine dress at the wedding where the minister led the party in a hymn by Reverend Samuel F. Smith, author of “America,” the last stanza of which, it was reported, “was sung by the sweet voice of Mrs. Whitman alone—clear, musical and unwavering”:

  In the deserts let me labor

  On the mountains let me tell

  How he died—the blessed Savior—

  To redeem a world from hell!

  Let me hasten,

  Far in heathen lands to dwell.

  Yes, my native land, I love thee,

  All thy scenes I love them well.

  Friends, connections, happy country,

  Can I bid you all farewell?

  Narcissa made other dresses of gaily colored calico for the journey and purchased a pair of small “gentleman’s riding boots” to wear while, she anticipated, riding sidesaddle to Oregon. She bought an inflatable life preserver for crossing the streams and rivers her husband had mentioned, and for the two of them made a spacious conical tent of mattress ticking waterproofed with oil. She also packed a considerable trunk with clothing, books, and similar necessities.

  The day after the wedding, the Whitmans and the two Nez Percé boys set out by wagon and sleigh from Elmira to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where they would board a canal boat bound for Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. In these earliest days of the long journey ahead, Narcissa sustained a loss that would become commonplace on the Oregon Trail: She wrote home that her trunk fell off the sleigh into a creek, ruined her books, and had to be abandoned. On her honeymoon, long before passing the last outposts of civilization, she had arrived at a sad emigrant truth: “The custom of the country is to possess nothing, and then you will lose nothing while traveling.”

  The Spaldings had gone ahead and in Pittsburgh had a meeting with the artist George Catlin, who in 1832 had traveled to the mouth of the Yellowstone River and along the way made sketches and paintings of Mandans, Assiniboines, Sioux, and Blackfeet. He regarded himself as an authority on the far West and told Spalding bluntly that it was a mistake to take a white woman into that unforgiving wilderness.

  The four missionaries came together for the first time in Cincinnati, where the Spaldings tarried several days while Henry visited his former classmates and professors at the seminary.
Narcissa said nothing about seeing him again but wrote of Eliza, whom she met there for the first time, “I like her very much. She wears well upon acquaintance. She is a very suitable person for Mr. Spalding—has the right temperament to match him. I think we shall get on well together.”

  Since they planned to travel to the Green River rendezvous with Tom Fitzpatrick’s trade caravan, which was jumping off from the Missouri border in mid-May, Spalding made the arrangements for the party to travel by steamer to Liberty, and in that frontier town their party expanded in numbers and encumbrances. Whitman took charge of a third Nez Percé lad who was waiting to return to his home country in Idaho, and assigned the three to take charge of the livestock he and Spalding purchased. Two white teenagers were hired for camp chores. The final member of the party who joined them in Liberty was William H. Gray, appointed by the Mission Board as “secular agent” for the Oregon missions. He was a cabinetmaker from Utica, age twenty-six, described somewhat ominously by Bancroft as a “good-looking young fellow, tall of stature, with fine black eyes … having pronounced natural abilities, of quick feelings, and a good hater where his jealousy was aroused.” Gray had applied to the board for missionary service but his sponsor, who said he was a skilled craftsman, and abstinent, stated bluntly that Gray had “a confidence in his own abilities to a fault” and described him as “a slow scholar.”

  On the basis of Captain Bonneville’s example and his own limited experiences in traveling from Liberty to the Green River, Whitman was convinced, despite Fitzpatrick’s doubts, that wagons could negotiate the tortured trails and mountain paths and be floated across the waterways to Oregon. Wagons seemed especially essential to convey the women, providing them with at least some comfort and protection in bad weather. Eliza Spalding was “sickly,” so Henry had purchased and sent ahead a light Dearborn wagon for her and their possessions. Since Narcissa insisted that she preferred to ride horseback beside her husband, a heavy farm wagon was obtained in Liberty for the party’s belongings, and the trade goods, camp gear, medicines, blacksmithing tools, plow, grain, seeds, and provisions purchased from Liberty outfitters. In all, with the thirteen-head beef herd, six mules, fourteen horses, and equipage, Spalding and Whitman spent nearly $3,000 in Mission Board funds to launch themselves toward the Rockies.