Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  After sending the wagons ahead, they crawled up the Missouri by ferry to Fort Leavenworth, then afoot and on horseback followed the North Platte, broke a church rule by traveling on Sunday, and reached the Loup Fork of the Platte. There they overtook Fitzpatrick’s caravan, an immense column of 400 horses and mules, seven big freight wagons each drawn by six-mule teams, and seventy men.

  The missionaries fell into the caravan’s daily routine. In her journal Narcissa wrote: “We encamp in a large ring—baggage and men, tents and wagons on the outside and all the animals except the cows fastened to pickets inside the circle.… In the morn as soon as the day breaks that first that we hear is the word ‘arise, arise’; then the mules set up as much noise as you never heard, which puts the whole camp in action.… You must think it very hard to have to get up so early after sleeping on the soft ground. When you find it hard work to open your eyes at seven o‘clock, just think of me.” While the horses and stock were feeding, she said, “we get our breakfast in a hurry and eat it. By this time the word ‘Catch up, catch up’ rings through the camp, for moving. We are ready to start usually at six, travel till eleven, encamp, rest and feed; start again about two, travel until six, or before if we come to a good tavern [her word for campsite], then camp for the night.”

  In the scheme of the caravan, her party ate dust. She wrote on June 3, 1836, “The fur Com[pany] is large this year. We are really a moving village.… If you wish to see the camp in motion, just look ahead and see first the pilot and the Captain, Fitzpatrick, just before him; next the pack animals, all mules loaded with great packs. Soon after you will see the wagons, and in the rear our company. We all cover quite a space.”

  She adapted, learned to “dine” on the ground on an India-rubber tablecloth that doubled as a cloak when it rained; scrubbed tin dishes, cups, knives, and spoons with sand; gathered buffalo chips for fuel. Of this latter chore she noted in her journal, “Our fuel for cooking since we left timber (no timber except on rivers) has been dried buffalo dung.… I supposed Harriet [one of Narcissa’s sisters] will make a face at this, but if she was here she would be glad to have her supper cooked at any rate, in this scarce timber country.”

  Crossing the Platte and any other waterway on the route tested everybody’s patience and endurance. Wagons had to be converted into boats by covering the box with waterproof hides and worrying them across with towlines; the women crossed in bull boats or on horseback; the cattle were swum across tended by their drovers, who stripped naked and tied their shirts around their heads.

  At Fort Laramie, to Whitman’s disappointment, the heavy freight wagon had to be left behind with all the other fur company rolling stock. Fitzpatrick insisted on it but gave in to the physician’s insistence on proceeding with Spalding’s wagon, the little Dearborn, which would carry Eliza Spalding and, after jettisoning what was agreed to be non-necessities, the missionaries’ combined gear. One other wagon in the caravan, actually a two-wheel cart, carried Broken Hand’s partner Milton Sublette, whose leg had been amputated the year before and whose cork substitute allowed him to stand and walk on flat ground but not to negotiate mountain trails. To help move the two wagons across the Laramie Mountains, an old buffalo trail was cleared of boulders and cottonwoods to create a rude roadway. Even so, the Dearborn spilled over once, and Sublette’s cart twice, before they cleared the passes. Spalding was depressed over their agonizingly slow progress and in his letter to the board wrote, “Never send another mission over these mountains if you value life and money.” Whitman, even though enslaved by the Dearborn, was more optimistic. “I see no reason to regret our choice of a journey by land,” he wrote.

  Eight hundred miles out from Liberty, the caravan camped at Independence Rock, a granite formation on which the names of passersby were scratched or daubed in axle grease. Fitzpatrick sent a rider ahead to the Green River to let the trappers know his party was coming in, and the express apparently also reported that the caravan was bringing along some missionaries, including two white women. A wild celebration awaited them after they crossed South Pass on Independence Day 1836, and as they pushed through the sagebrush along Little Sandy Creek, a Green River tributary, the travelers were greeted by an advance party of trappers, Nez Percé, and Flathead Indians from the rendezvous encampment. “Their approach was like the rush of a tornado down a mountain side,” Bancroft wrote of these welcomers, “the cracking of their rifles and their terrifying yells like the snapping off of the branches of trees before the wind, and the fierce howlings of a tempest.”

  The raucous greeters were led by a barrel-chested, black-bearded mountain man and bear hunter from Virginia named Joseph Lafayette “Joe” Meek. He wanted to catch an early glimpse of the first white women to cross the Continental Divide and also deliver a message to the missionaries that some Indians had brought to the rendezvous from Oregon. The letter was from Samuel Parker and in it he informed Whitman that he would not be joining them as planned. He was worn out and could not even consider making the overland journey from Fort Vancouver. He said he had explored the Oregon Country from Jason Lee’s spread on the Willamette to Spokane and Fort Colville on the north, and gave a rambling discourse on potential mission sites.

  This was devastating news. Spalding and Whitman, and indeed the Mission Board in New York, had counted on Parker to lay the groundwork for establishing their mission, gather information, not only locate ideal sites but begin the clearing and building work, and serve as guide from the Green River to the Oregon Country. Now they learned that he had spent a comfortable winter at Fort Vancouver, and he hinted that he would return home by sea. He had left them stranded with no place to go but ahead, likely to reach Oregon in the winter with no prospects except to accept, like mendicants, whatever charity was available from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  15

  Spies

  “… TO CONTROL THE DESTINIES OF THE PACIFIC.”

  1

  In his letter to the Whitmans, Samuel Parker dilated excitedly on the explorations he had made out of Fort Vancouver but failed to say what these ramblings meant to the missionaries he left stranded on the Green River. Marcus Whitman was angered at Parker’s unexplained and inexplicable reversal of their plan and wrote, “We cannot say how much good Mr. Parker’s tour will do others. It has done us none, for instead of meeting us at the Rendezvous as he agreed, he neglected to write a single letter containing any information concerning the country, company, Indians, prospects or advice whatever.”

  The Whitmans had faith that the Lord and Tom Fitzpatrick would solve their problem of getting on to the Columbia; meantime, there was nothing to do but wait for the solution and enjoy the spectacle around them.

  Nothing in their lives, before or after, would surpass the experience of the twelve days the missionaries spent among the 400 fur traders and 1,500 Indians scattered in the camps and lodges along the lush banks of the Green that July of 1836. The women were special celebrities, and Narcissa was ecstatic over the blunt stares and crude chivalric attention paid her as she mingled, wearing her bright calicos, with the rough crews, chatting, shaking hands, hugging, and passing out church tracts. The Indians, mostly Nez Percé, Flatheads, Shoshoni, and Bannocks, were stunning in their paint, feathers, beads, breechcloths, and moccasins, carrying their lances, shields, and war clubs and dancing to chants, drums, and rattles. They staged a wild horseback show for the newcomers, then came forward to inspect the ladies, hoping for a kiss, a foreign practice they heard was commonplace among white men and women. The trappers, the trail-filthy, shag-bearded Sons of Saturn whose drunken “sprees,” knife fights, and horseback and marksmanship contests were standard rendezvous fare, came shyly to have a close look at the “Bible-toters.” Some even asked for the Good Book and any Christian literature available to take on the trail for any literate comrade to read aloud. Narcissa wrote home excitedly that she and Eliza could have dispensed two mule-loads of books and tracts had they been available.

  Eliza, who had a gif
t for languages, began learning the Nez Percé tongue and compiling a vocabulary. Narcissa helped, but William Gray, the Utica woodworker and would-be missionary who was ever alert for any faint sign of what he considered inappropriate conduct, said Mrs. Whitman spent too much time flirting with Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, and the Scotsman Stewart. “In consequence of these attentions or interruptions,” he wrote, “she did not acquire the native language as fast as Mrs. Spalding.”

  Narcissa, in fact, drank in the spectacle of the rendezvous precisely as might be expected of a woman cloistered all her life, and saw in the savages—Indian and mountain man alike—the quintessence of her Christianizing dreams. “This is a cause worth living for!” she wrote in her journal, and her exuberance continued until they departed their roistering company to continue their journey into the grim and rocky sage-lands to the west.

  Midway in their stay at the rendezvous, the missionaries were heartened by the arrival of Nathaniel Wyeth, on his way to the states after his failed enterprises in Oregon. He rode into camp with a brigade of Hudson’s Bay men led by Thomas McKay and brought additional news from the lately unrevered Samuel Parker. The reverend urged his colleagues to come directly to Fort Walla Walla under the Company’s protection, and before they could ponder how they were expected to get there, McKay and his partners graciously offered to escort them. Their hope now was to reach Oregon before Parker departed for home and obtain from him firsthand, specific, critical information on where they should build their missions and how they would sustain themselves through the winter.

  They followed McKay’s brigade out of their camp on July 18, bound for Wyeth’s fort on the Portneuf River. Narcissa was in the early stages of pregnancy, the baby probably conceived at Fort Laramie in June when the couple found some rare privacy. Although she never mentioned her condition in her journal (it would have been unthinkable to do so), she probably suffered from morning sickness—the odor of sagebrush nauseated her—yet she did not seek Eliza Spalding’s company in the Dearborn. Instead, she continued to ride the “excellent sidesaddle and very easy horse” with the Nez Percé boys, the “cow column,” and the man she called “Husband” at the rear of the column.

  She did not complain, but Marcus’ bullheaded coaxing of the wagon down along the Bear River sorely tested her. “Husband had a tedious time with the waggon today,” she wrote. “Waggon was upset twice. I do not wonder at all at this. It was a greater wonder that it was not turning a somerset continually. It is not very grateful to my feelings to see him wear out with such excessive fatigue.… All the most difficult part of the way he has walked, in his laborious attempt to take the wagon over.” On one occasion the wagon was stuck fast in creek mud and Whitman spent most of a day waist-deep in water levering and muscling it free. Narcissa had a momentary hope that Marcus would relinquish the wagon when at Soda Springs the axle broke, but he managed to dismantle the forward wheels and rig it as a cart so he could belabor it on toward Fort Hall.

  She noticed her Job-like mate “not as fleshy” as when they’d started out from Missouri. In truth, none of them were. On the wicked trail and under cloudless skies and the pitiless sun, the party endured a diet of buffalo jerky and little else. She wrote in a letter home, “I can scarce eat it, it appears so filthy, but it will keep us alive & we ought to be thankful for it.” She said to her sisters, “Girls do not waste bread, if you know how well I should relish even the dryest morsal you would save every piece carefully.”

  But she bore up. “Do not think I regret coming,” she wrote. “No, far from it. I would not go back for the world. I am contented and happy notwithstanding I get very hungry & weary. Have six weeks steady journeying before us. Will the Lord give me patience to endure it.… Long for rest, but must not murmur.”

  Wyeth’s Fort Hall provided them with a rest and a chance for laundering and to add turnips and fried bread to their buffalo-jerky diet. When they departed the fort and crossed the Portneuf, heading for the Hudson’s Bay post at the confluence of the Snake and Boisé Rivers, the misery started again. McKay’s hunters brought in some elk meat and fresh salmon, but such delicacies could not divert them long from the oppressive heat, the incessant stink—to Narcissa at least—of sagebrush, “so stif and hard as to be much in the way of our animals and waggon,” and the clouds of mosquitoes that nearly drove them, their pack animals, and cows mad.

  Marcus continued to heave the wagon-cart forward, even after it turned over in the mud of the Boisé taking its mule team down with it, tangling cart, harness, and drowning animals in a frothing mass that required two horse teams and two men to help turn it aright. Only when they reached Fort Boisé on August 19, after 1,500 miles of tribulations, was Whitman persuaded by McKay and his men to surrender the infernal wagon at long last.

  As they forded the Snake on horseback and on rope-towed rafts made of willows and rushes toward the Burnt River and the Blue Mountains beyond, the missionaries decided they must split up. The Whitmans and William Gray were to push on with some of McKay’s men to reach Fort Vancouver before Reverend Parker shipped out for home. The Spaldings and the Nez Percé wards were to follow, bringing along the cattle and pack animals, with the balance the Company’s brigade.

  On August 29, the advance party reached the western slopes of the Blue Mountains—which reminded Narcissa of the Catskills—and glimpsed the great white cone of Mount Hood in the hazy distance. Three days later they sighted the timber palisades of Fort Walla Walla, the eighteen-year-old Hudson’s Bay post on the east bank of the Columbia and at the mouth of the river from which it derived its name. That night Narcissa wrote in a letter home, “You can better imagine our feelings than I can describe them. I could not realize that the end of our journey was so near. We arose as soon as it was light, then dressed for Walla Walla.… If you could have seen us now you would have been surprised, for both man and beast appeared alike propelled by the same force. The whole company galloped almost all the way to the Fort.”

  They reached it at rooster’s crow on September 1, 1836, six months and thirteen days after Narcissa packed her black bombazine dress, her calicos and books, and embarked with her husband by sleigh for Pennsylvania.

  The post factor, Pierre Pambrun, a Québec veteran of the War of 1812 and one of John McLoughlin’s most trusted agents, welcomed the Americans into his drift-log stockade’s inner gallery and led them to guest quarters where they could bathe and ready for breakfast. Narcissa breathed in the fort’s civilized trappings—clean water, soap, a soft bed, chinaware, cutlery. “No one knows the feelings occasioned by seeing objects once familiar after long privation,” she wrote.

  The Spaldings and their escort joined the Whitmans two days later. Together they were the first emigrant families to travel overland to the Pacific, more than 3,000 miles from home.

  Nothing had been accomplished by the Whitmans’ rush across the Blue Mountains to Fort Walla Walla, since the Spaldings, who had been expected to arrive at a later date after inspecting potential mission sites en route, had also proceeded apace without inspecting anything. None of them as yet knew if Samuel Parker had departed the Columbia, but the urgency of determining that fell below resting and gaining lost strength under the hospitable care of Factor Pambrun.

  They lingered several days at the fort before embarking for the Company’s great fortress on the lower river. Pambrun personally escorted them downstream in a thirty-foot bateau, the oars pulled by Company voyageurs. The only discomforts of the journey were the high winds, which forced the boat ashore to wait until they abated, and an incident that occurred during a portage around The Dalles rapids. In a Chinook village Narcissa, apparently inspecting it too closely, became infested with fleas. Her hair and dress, she said, were “black with these creatures, making all possible speed to lay siege to my neck and ears.” She fled to Husband, who brushed her off as best he could and set up a protective arbor so she could wash and change her clothing.

  In the forenoon of September 12, with the voyageurs singi
ng and with a bite of fall in the air, the bateau swung around a piney point of land and the missionaries caught their first view of what Narcissa called “the New York of the Pacific Ocean.” On the Fort Vancouver landing stood Dr. McLoughlin with his second-in-command, James Douglas, to greet them.

  They learned at once that they were too late to interdict Samuel Parker. He had sailed on the steamship Beaver for the Sandwich Islands three months past, about the time his colleagues had reached Fort Laramie, and had left no messages or instructions. After the earlier Parker disappointments, the Whitmans and the Spaldings seem not to have been overwhelmed by the news and fell quickly to planning the exploration of mission sites—plural. At some point in their travels, probably long before they reached the Columbia, they agreed to separate, ostensibly to spread the Gospel farther by establishing two missions but as much because they were never comfortable together. Parker, in the letter from him received at the rendezvous, advised that a site might be established among the Nez Percé, perhaps near the junction of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers in Idaho, and suggested also a station among the Cayuse people east of Fort Walla Walla.

  These ideas seemed sensible to both families, both eager to put miles between themselves, and they were probably endorsed by McLoughlin as well, who saw such stations as pleasingly remote from the Hudson’s Bay main theater of operations. He urged that while the menfolk set out on their explorations the ladies be left in his care; then, when the sites were selected, the men would gather their wives, the building materials, and the laborers they would require. This was agreed upon, and Whitman, Spalding, and William Gray set out on September 21 with some Nez Percé helpers and a few other men on loan from McLoughlin, promising to return within a month.