Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  One charming and often quoted story told of a Missourian asking a man just returned from California if there were fevers and “ague” out there. The man said that there was but one man in all of California who ever got a chill there, and he was the subject of so much wonderment that people in Monterey went eighteen miles out into the country just to see him shake.

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  To Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding, 1841 meant they were entering their fifth year of work at their missions, the Whitmans at the “Place of the Rye Grass” on Mill Creek on the north bank of the Walla Walla River, and the Spaldings a comfortable 110 miles northeast, among the Nez Percé at Lapwai.

  The first years of their “Call” to minister to the Indians were devoted more to the physical labor required to make their missions self-sustaining—building, planting, fencing, tending to stock—than to teaching and preaching, giving such a visitor as Lieutenant Charles Wilkes the impression that they were more interested in making money than converts.

  This notion was entirely specious, for these families made neither money nor converts. Both missionary families suffered frustrations and failures unforeseen in the days when they dreamed of delegations of savages arriving on their doorstep eager to learn the Christian way of life. Henry Spalding wrote Elijah White, a physician who came out to Oregon in 1836, “I have no evidence to suppose but a vast majority of them [the Nez Percé] would look on with indifference and see our dwelling burned to the ground, and our heads severed from our bodies.” This fatalistic thinking was echoed by Congregational missionaries among the Spokane Indians near Fort Colville. Elkanah Walker of Maine and Cushing Eells of Massachusetts were of the opinion that the natives were more interested in tobacco than in the Testaments. (In 1847, Mrs. Eells wrote home, “We have been here almost nine years and have not yet been permitted to hear the rites of one penitent or the songs of one redeemed soul.”)

  The mission families did their best against crushing odds. The Lapwai station was commodious and warmed by eleven fireplaces. It had a reception room, a spinning and weaving room, a dining room and bedrooms, and a schoolhouse, all under one roof. The Spaldings had planned and supervised the building of a church, mill, blacksmith shop, granary, warehouses, and farm buildings. They strove for self-sufficiency, the Board of Foreign Missions’ sine qua non, and worked, taught, and preached tirelessly, in isolation and, at times, in fear. The Nez Percé, even those who sent their children to the mission school and attended the mission church, were fickle in their relationships with the Spaldings, and unpredictable. They pulled down the sawmill on one occasion, with no known motive, threatened Spalding, at least once carrying guns, and repeatedly insulted his wife.

  At Waiilatpu, the Whitmans experienced a similar pattern of progress, frustration, and signals of danger in their efforts among the Cayuse’s people. With Indian workers and hired hands they planted wheat and potato fields, built a gristmill and a sawmill, and fenced pasturage for a small herd of cattle, some horses, and hogs and sheep imported from the Sandwich Islands. Their story-and-a-half adobe mission house was sixty feet long by eighteen wide with a library, bedrooms, dining and sitting rooms, a kitchen, and schoolrooms where Narcissa taught reading and singing. A second house, forty by thirty feet in size and occupied by the Utica woodworker and “secular agent” for the Oregon missions, William H. Gray, stood a short distance away. The Walla Walla River and a millpond formed one side of the mission grounds, an irrigation ditch the other. Toward the west stretched a pretty meadow and copses of apple trees. The mission sawmill lay twenty miles up Mill Creek.

  The Cayuse, the principal natives of the Waiilatpu area, shared a similar language with the Nez Percé, were related to them through intermarriage, and, like the Nez Percé, were master horsemen.2 But the two tribes distrusted each other and the Cayuse were reputedly more erratic in their behavior and more “savage,” this perhaps growing out of battles with their traditional enemies, the Shoshoni, whose lands lay on the eastern slopes of the Blue Mountains and in Snake River country.

  (In a report he sent east, Elijah White said that the insolence of the Cayuse had been growing since the visit of Captain Benjamin Bonneville, who in 1834 paid the Indians for their furs far more than Hudson’s Bay agents and that the Indians began making demands ever after.)

  Some Nez Percé who visited the Whitmans early upon their settling at the Waiilatpu station warned them that the Cayuse “were not good people,” were “morose and treacherous.” This signal, perhaps dismissed as intertribal bitterness, seemed much more alarming and premonitory after a series of incidents the Whitmans endured that were even more unnerving than those experienced by the Spaldings. From the outset, the Whitmans had to contend with the Cayuse’s peculiar notion that they were owed by the missionaries and not vice versa: They demanded to be paid for receiving religious instruction and for use of the land being cultivated. Split-Lip, chief of the Cayuse of the Waiilatpu area, was a particularly demanding and insulting bête noir of the missionaries, so much so that on several occasions Whitman had to seek help from Pierre Pambrun, the factor at Fort Walla Walla, in dealing with him. The natives were careful not to anger the Hudson’s Bay Company agents, fearing that they might withdraw their trading posts from the country, and Pambrun was generally able to assist Whitman and manage the menacing natives.

  Nonetheless, there were confrontations, and the direst of these occurred in 1840 when a band of Cayuse rode through the mission wheat field and trampled it flat. When Marcus Whitman attempted to reprove them, several of the band threw mud at him, while others dismounted and stood face-to-face with the terrified man, pulling at his beard and ears, cocking and snapping an unloaded pistol at his head, threatening him with an ax, and shouting that they would tear down the mission house and burn it. Whitman, shaken by the confrontation, reported it to John McLoughlin. The factor, who had never trusted the Cayuse and was dubious of any missionary efforts among them, strongly counseled the Whitmans to quit Waiilatpu forthwith.

  But they stayed on, and in 1841 withstood another menacing incident, this one involving Gray, the volatile cabinetmaker residing on the mission grounds, who struck an Indian boy for some unknown offense. The boy’s uncle was the Cayuse chief Tiloukaikt—described by Bancroft as “a haughty and irascible man”—who sought out Whitman in the mission yard and avenged the insult by striking at the missionary and knocking off his hat.

  Narcissa, too, had suffered the insults and ingratitude of the Indians but bore them more stoically than her husband. She had learned to bear the vicissitudes of wilderness life by surrounding herself with children. She had arrived in Oregon pregnant, and on her birthday, March 4, 1837, gave birth to their daughter, Alice Clarissa, the first white American child born in the Oregon Country. The girl, the light of the Whitmans’ lives, drowned in the Walla Walla River in June 1838, and Narcissa never recovered from her death nor bore another child. She did persuade Marcus to adopt Helen Meek and Mary Ann Bridger, the half-Indian children of the mountain men Joe Meek and James Bridger. In 1842 she took in an orphaned three-year-old “Spanish-Indian” boy, and when her husband returned from a trip east in 1843, he brought with him his thirteen-year-old nephew to join the household. Finally, in 1844, the Whitmans adopted the seven children of Henry and Naomi Sager, both of whom had died on the Oregon Trail.

  For all the reverses in their proselytizing, both the Whitmans and the Spaldings were sustained by their faith and the harsh realization that their Christianizing work would require a lifetime or more to produce a healthy number of converts. They were at least making a start in a noble endeavor. They were also learning that their work not only involved battering down centuries of heathenish spiritual beliefs and teaching the path to righteousness, but overcoming secular hindrances as well. The Indians had been despoiled by the white men who had preceded the missionaries, had been taught the value of things, a concept foreign to them before their intercourse with whites. Both the Cayuse and Nez Percé complained
often that the missions and fields had been appropriated without permission and that the crops were raised and sold to others with the Indians receiving no part of the profits; that mission gristmills even charged the Indians for grinding their grain. Both tribes wanted the missionaries to share their cattle, hogs, and sheep.

  To the Indians these were simple matters. The whites, after all, were intruders—and by 1841 there were nearly 500 of them in the Oregon Country and the number was swelling. To the missionaries and other settlers, the natives were shiftless, intractable, and insolent ingrates, owing much to the whites for teaching them English, the Bible, the value of planting, of livestock, of trading in furs, of money. To the whites the Indians were owed nothing, least of all for the land they claimed. The land was American land, there for the taking for those who would “improve” it, and the land claimers and improvers were on the march.

  One secular issue that more than any other burdened the missionaries and distracted them from their teaching and religious work was the notion of self-sufficiency. This lodestone seemed so rational and possible in New York, where policies were formulated by men who could not locate the Continental Divide much less divine what obstacles lay beyond it, but in actual practice the idea was chimerical. For the missions to become independent of home support, more churchly people, missionary families, were needed, and above all, more time was needed.

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  Sapling Grove

  “OREGON OR THE GRAVE”

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  In early May 1841, at a place called Sapling Grove, west of Independence, Missouri, a frontier schoolteacher named John Bidwell paced his camp, waiting for other members of the Western Emigration Society to rendezvous and begin their plunge westward to the Pacific. He was headed for Mexican California; others of the society were interested in the Oregon Country. None knew anything about getting to either place (“The ignorance of the route was complete,” Bidwell later wrote), and the only maps of the Rocky Mountain country and beyond were filled with blank spaces and purported but unproven lakes and rivers.

  Bidwell seemed an incongruous candidate to lead, or even follow, an overland party of emigrants. He was twenty-two, fit and handsome, but except for a brief stint as a farmer had spent his adult life studying and teaching. Still, he had always been drifting westward. He was a Chautauqua County New Yorker, attended schools in Ohio, and ventured to Missouri in 1839 with seventy-five dollars in cash and “nothing more formidable than a pocketknife” to protect himself.

  He was teaching school in Platte County when he caught the westering fever after hearing of the glories of California from a Santa Fé trader who had been there. Toward the end of 1840, Bidwell and a few like-minded enthusiasts organized the ambitiously named Western Emigration Society. A month after it was publicized, 500 people, most of them from Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, and Kentucky, responded and signed a pledge to buy a suitable “outfit” and come to the Sapling Grove rendezvous in the first week of May 1841 “armed and equipped to cross the Rocky Mountains to California.”

  Bidwell himself scraped up enough money to buy a gun, a wagon, and some basic provisions. An associate who said he would supply horses backed out at the last moment, and the schoolmaster had to search Independence and Westport Landing (the future Kansas City) to find another partner. This man owned a good horse and had a few dollars in cash, traded the horse for a yoke of oxen to pull the wagon, and also bought a “sorry-looking one-eyed mule.”

  When Bidwell reached Sapling Grove a week or so before the departure time, only one wagon had preceded him; indeed, until a few days ago before heading out, the whole scheme seemed to have disintegrated. Some attributed the dampening of enthusiasm among Bidwell’s followers to letters appearing in the press written by one Thomas Jefferson Farnham, a Vermont lawyer who had settled in Illinois and attended a Jason Lee appearance at the Main Street Presbyterian Church in Peoria in September 1838. Farnham was enthralled by Lee’s tales of the Oregon Country and even more so by the stories told by one of Lee’s Chinook boys about the salmon runs of the Columbia and how easily the fish could be caught, dried, and sold. The lawyer began having Nat Wyeth–like visions of a fortune to be made in salmon-pickling, and in the spring of 1839 he put together a party of fifteen wilderness-raw adventurers calling themselves the Oregon Dragoons. Mrs. Farnham even stitched them a flag bearing the legend “Oregon or the Grave.” They set out from Independence for the Pacific with the vaulting ambition to plant the flag—the Stars and Stripes, not Mrs. Farnham’s banner—in the Oregon Country. They intended claiming sovereignty in the name of the United States, repelling any contrariness by the British and their Hudson’s Bay agents, pickling a lot of fish, and returning home with shiploads of kegged salmon and their pockets lined with gold.

  Not surprisingly, none of this worked out. The Peorians added several men and two missionary couples to their party in Independence, but others defected en route. They missed the outward-bound caravan carrying supplies and trade goods to the Green River rendezvous and were forced to tag along with traders on the Santa Fé Trail to Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River, arriving there on July 5, where more men deserted. Those remaining bickered over “Captain” Farnham’s military strictness. One man was badly wounded in a firearms accident and had to be carried in a wagon and at times in a makeshift litter. Farnham accused some of the Oregon Dragoons of planning to abandon the wounded man on the Colorado prairie, resigned his captaincy, and hired a guide at Bent’s Fort to take him and four loyalists west across the Rockies. By the time he reached the Walla Walla River in late September 1839, the lawyer was down to two companions and an Indian guide.

  He visited the Whitmans at Waiilatpu and Jason and Daniel Lee in the Willamette valley, and there received from a delegation of settlers a memorial signed by sixty-seven citizens of the United States, which he promised to deliver to the appropriate authorities in Washington. The petition contained familiar grievances, demands, and questions: American traders had been driven from Oregon by the British; they were unprotected and beholden to foreigners even for such necessities as clothing; there was an alarming increase in the crimes of theft, murder, even infanticide, which they were helpless to arrest since they had no legal recourses of any kind. The paper also included an alarming reference to being at the mercy not only of the savages around them but of “others” who would do them harm, the “others” a transparent reference to the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  On October 15, accompanied by Daniel Lee, Farnham departed for Fort Vancouver, and at The Dalles, where Lee maintained a small satellite mission station, the two had a run-in with a band of Indians that clearly illustrated the problems the missionaries were having with the “savages.” Farnham, in his 1841 book, Travels to the Rocky Mountains, described how he and Daniel Lee encountered a party of about forty Dalles natives and tried to recover from them a bridle and some saddle leather that had been stolen from Lee’s workshop. The Indians took umbrage at the suggestion of thievery and the chief of the tribe drew a pistol while Farnham raised a rifle. No blood was shed, but the natives were greatly agitated and refused to assist the white men in loading their canoes to continue their journey downriver.

  At Fort Vancouver, Farnham paid a call on McLoughlin but cut his visit short, planted no flag and pickled no fish—these ideas seemed to have vanished along with most of his Oregon Dragoons. Alexander Simpson, a clerk at the fort related to Governor George Simpson, described Farnham as possessing much dry humor but added that he “talked grandiloquently and acted shabbily.”

  Eighteen of Farnham’s followers, a few of them members of the original Oregon Dragoons, stayed on in Oregon but their disappointed captain departed on the Hudson’s Bay ship Nereid on December 3 bound for Oahu. Once there, he dispatched the first of his letters to the secretary of war on the nefarious and monopolistic practices of the British and its Hudson’s Bay agents. In this he followed the custom of many Americans before him in partaking of the Company’s hospitality, sa
iling on a Company ship, and, once free of its charity, slandering the Company with a will.

  From the Sandwich Islands Farnham proceeded to Monterey, spent a few weeks in California—during one of the province’s periodic rebellions against Mexican authority—and returned home after crossing Mexico from San Blas to the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans.

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  Unlike most who visited the Pacific Northwest before him, Farnham was not impressed with the place. The Willamette valley, which Jason Lee and others had oversold as a wilderness Arcadia, the lawyer found unattractive: unbearably hot in summer, unbearably wet and cold in winter, plagued with mosquitoes and flies and the fevers they carried. Oregon as a whole was too dry in the east, too wet in the west; the forests were too heavy in some places, too sparse in others; the mouth of the Columbia was unfit for commercial use. He wrote even more scathingly of Alta California and its turbulent governance and warned would-be emigrants that the province was no Eden and that life there was harsh. Bancroft took severe issue with Farnham’s California views, writing that “in all those parts resting upon his own observations it is worthless trash, and in all that relates to the California people a tissue of falsehoods,” but the Peorian’s perorations, published as open letters, were influential.

  What impact Farnham’s work had on the Pacific-bound, specifically those of John Bidwell’s Emigration Society, is unknown, but it had some negative effect, along with the cholera epidemic raging through the Missouri countryside, rumors of Indian depredations and associated miseries of overland travel, and the economic gloom in Missouri, where farm prices were still disastrously low. Many of Bidwell’s 500 pledge signers were too ill, broke, or scared to go anywhere.

  Even so, by the departure date, sixty-nine emigrants, including five women and several children, gathered at Sapling Grove with thirteen mule- and ox-drawn wagons. Among the latecomers was one John Bartleson from Jackson County, Missouri, who fourteen years earlier had helped plan the town of Independence. He brought seven men with him and announced to the others that if he were not named captain of the train, he and his associates would stay behind, presumably to wait for another emigrant group willing to let him lead them.