Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Their party had swollen to eighty-seven, forty-one of them children, and twenty-three sagging wagons when it set out from Bridger on the last day of July 1846. Within a few days’ crawling travel, they learned the awful truth of the shortcut described in Lansford Hastings’s guidebook; the Donner-Reed train took twenty-one days to make the thirty-six-mile crossing of the Wasatch Mountains.

  They reached the Humboldt River on September 30, after a nightmarish crossing of the desert, which killed most of their oxen and forced abandonment of all but a few of their wagons, and they approached the Sierra Nevada foothills a month later. By now they had exhausted their rations and were eating wild onions and dabs of tallow from their tar buckets. Many of their cows and horses were stolen in a raid by Paiute Indians; they hoped to salvage the remaining animals against the prospect of a starving time before reaching the Sacramento valley.

  On October 20, eleven killing weeks out of Bridger, they reached the lush meadows of the Truckee River and rested, grazing their pitifully reduced animals for five fatal days with an early winter snow falling on the mountain ridges before them. The party moved on to a big lake on the thirty-first, just beyond which lay Truckee Pass, the last major barrier between them and their destination.

  But they could not cross. The blizzards, snowdrifts, and murderous winds of the pass closed the corridor. They found an old cabin, threw another one together from timber and driftwood along the lake, made lean-tos and brush shelters, and erected tepees and tents to huddle in against the snow and cold. Snowshoes were fashioned for futile attempts to cross the mountain range. The last animals, including the Reeds’ dog, were killed for food. They made gruel for the babies from precious handfuls of flour; ate owls, wolves, and whatever other starving animals strayed near enough to be killed with a rifle shot; boiled hides and drank the gluey broth; and, on the day after Christmas, began roasting and eating strips of flesh from the dead.

  By the time the first rescue party reached them on February 4, 1847, Jake Donner and three of his hired hands were dead; George Donner was dying from exposure, starvation, and a gashed hand turned gangrenous; and the others were reduced to wraiths, several teetering on the brink of insanity. Rescuers stumbled through snowdrifts to come upon scenes more chilling than any Sierra gale. In one appalling camp where a woman named Elizabeth Graves and her five-year-old son Franklin had died, parts of their bodies were found boiling in a pot as her infant daughter, a miraculous survivor, lay wailing near Elizabeth’s carved-up corpse. Two members of the rescue team, William Eddy and William Foster, who had struggled over Truckee Pass with a few others to seek help at Sutter’s Fort on the Sacramento River, returned to an unutterable horror. Each had left a young son behind at Truckee Lake in the care of others, and both boys had died. A big, well-educated German named Lewis Keseberg, who had emigrated to the United States only two years past, told Eddy and Foster that he had found the boys’ bodies in the snow and eaten them. He was discovered lying beside a pot containing the liver and lungs of one of the boys and said he had subsisted entirely on human flesh despite the nearby ox quarters lying in the snow, which he claimed were “too dry for eating.”

  Of the eighty-nine members of the train who crossed the Wasatch Mountains, five had died before reaching Truckee Lake; thirty-six others perished in the camps below Truckee Pass or in attempting to cross it, and one died after the rescue: The toll was forty-two dead, forty-seven alive.

  After her ordeal, twelve-year-old Virginia Reed, daughter of James and Margaret, all of whom had survived the ordeal without resorting to cannibalism, wrote a cousin back home, “Never take no cut ofs and hury along as fast as you can.”

  2

  Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were not sure what they had accomplished in their eleven years in the Oregon Country. They had come out in ’36, before any migration, great or small, filled with inspiration and fervent to do the Lord’s work “among the heathen.” They had carved out their mission station among the Cayuse people at their Place of the Rye Grass with the expectation that if they made the Bible and its message available the people would come, just as the Flatheads and Nez Percé had journeyed all the way to Saint Louis to find out about the white man’s God.

  They were not expecting miracles; the work would take time, supreme physical and mental effort, and forbearance, and this, they knew, would take a toll on them. But they would make progress even if as water dripping on a stone. They would convert the savages to Christianity, send the saved out to proselytize among others of their tribe and bring them in to Waiilatpu in ever-increasing numbers. They were prepared for every exigency but failure.

  The sheer joy over their prospects and the daily labors building the mission house, schoolrooms, outbuildings, and mill; tilling the soil and planting; teaching and ministering to the bodies as well as the souls of those who drifted to them masked any foreboding they had after hearing Dr. John McLoughlin’s early warning that the Cayuse were a “bad people,” not to be trusted. At first the Whitmans could not countenance such an idea—there were no “bad” Indians, only ignorant ones awaiting the salvation the missionaries were bringing to them. But they came to see, with the passage of months and years, little evidence that their religious work was making a difference; they had made a few converts but those few seemed listless and irresolute, with none of the humble gratitude and fervor expected of the newly saved.

  Whitman had made an arduous return east in the spring of 1843 to appeal directly to the Board of Foreign Missions not to close his Waiilatpu station, Henry and Eliza Spalding’s place among the Nez Percé at Lapwai, or any of the others. He made no professions of success in converting the Indians but set before the board’s directors other compelling arguments: The Indians ought not to be abandoned at a time when the immigrant population was increasing almost daily; the stations were needed to provide medical aid and assistance to the emigrant trains; the Catholics were moving in in numbers and would fill any vacuum left if the Protestants departed.

  He won but a small triumph: The missions could stay open but without further monetary assistance from the governing board.

  He returned disconsolately to Oregon with the Gantt-Applegate train in May 1843 and learned that in his absence Narcissa had suffered indignities at the hands of the increasingly truculent Cayuse. On an October night during his absence, a man named Tamsucky, believed to have been a subchief under Tiloukaikt of the Cayuse, tried to enter her bedroom but was run off. When he heard of the incident, Archibald McKinley, the Hudson’s Bay factor at Fort Walla Walla, drove a carriage to the station and insisted that she accompany him back to the fort. Subsequently she spent time with the Methodists at The Dalles, the inland port on the Columbia, and with friends in the Willamette. While she was away, the Waiilatpu grain mill was burned to the ground. Marcus heard the stories, surveyed the ruins, and became convinced that McLoughlin had been right all along.

  As the only physician in an area extending from Fort Walla Walla to The Dalles, Whitman was away from Waiilatpu more often than not, riding hundreds of miles on horseback to provide medical aid to settlers and Indian villages. In the first few years of their work Narcissa accompanied him, but as the numbers of emigrants on the Oregon Trail increased, she was left alone to manage the mission and its farm, to run the school for Cayuse Indian boys she had started, to assist newcomers, and to entertain such distinguished visitors as John C. Frémont, John A. Sutter, up from his “New Helvetia” land grant in northern California, and Charles Wilkes.

  After a few years of lonely work at the mission, Narcissa’s letters home devolved from youthful exuberance and naïveté to despondency over the “proud, wayward” natives she had come out to serve. She was an “indefatigable instructress,” T. J. Farnham said after visiting the mission in 1839, and a Wilkes expedition member reported in 1841 that she had 124 natives on the school rolls (although the average attendance was but twenty-five). She tried to teach Cayuse women to sew, knit, and spin, but with little success. She wrote a
friend, “The Kayuse women are too proud to be seen usefully employed.” Nor did she have better luck with the Walla Walla women, a related people.

  She confided to her family that the Indians sought the “Book of Heaven” as a source of white man’s power rather than for its Christian inspiration, and said that they were becoming distrustful of the missions and missionaries. Her letters were filled with her health concerns, and with an overall graveness and melancholy that worried her family.

  The Whitmans’ apprehension of the Cayuse began before Marcus made his Boston journey and grew apace after he returned. The Indians had always seemed indolent, selfish, and ungrateful, but these were ancient traits that simply had to be dealt with patiently. There were more ominous developments: The natives began stealing horses and cattle, sought to extract payment from the missionaries for everything from “language lessons” to use of their land for farming. They raided the gardens, stole vegetables, fruits, and grain so blatantly that William Gray, the “secular agent” who accompanied the Whitmans and the Spaldings to Oregon, decided to respond by poisoning some melons he knew would be stolen. The violently ill culprits learned no lesson from this extreme measure but they promised revenge.

  “The savages of the Upper Columbia were very good men, for savages,” H. H. Bancroft wrote. “It is true they were thieves, and if their natural benevolence prompted them to relieve the necessities of the white strangers, they rewarded themselves the first opportunity. Thieving was a legitimate means of securing themselves against want, and lying only a defence against discovery and loss.” The mistake the missionaries made, he said, was believing that such behavior was proof of the Indians’ need for spiritual guidance, “when it was, in fact, an evidence of a natural emulation, to put themselves on a footing with the superior race.” In this, he said, “both teachers and pupils were deceived; the savages in expecting to acquire in a single lifetime the civilization which was the slow growth of unknown ages; the missionary in believing that he could graft on this wild stock a germ whose fruit would not be tinctured with the bitter sap of the uncultivated tree.”

  At the root of the mission failures, he said, lay the “characteristic covetousness of the aboriginal, and his inability to understand that he could not at once become the equal of his teacher. Here his self-love was mortified. He began to suspect that his teachers were governed by selfish and sinister motives in intruding into his country. The more white men he saw, the more this conviction grew.”

  At their Lapwai station, Henry and Eliza Spalding grew worried about the spreading Indian unrest, worried more for the Whitmans than for themselves. Even the Nez Percé distrusted the Cayuse people, and Henry made a point of warning emigrants coming through his mission lands to avoid them. After the boundary settlement he also began asking newcomers if the United States might be sending army dragoons to keep the peace.

  The Spaldings, like the Whitmans, had initial successes at their station, with good school attendance, a sawmill and gristmill in operation, and families working in the fields, but by 1842, with the first sizable force of emigrants arriving on the Oregon Trail, they saw the crumbling of the edifice they had so laboriously built. The Indians began deserting the mission, and classroom and worship-service attendance dwindled.

  Joel Palmer, among the 1845 emigrants, visited Lapwai in the spring of 1846 to buy horses, and while he admired the work done by the Spaldings, he wrote that “it is impossible for one family to counteract all the influences of bad and designing men, of whom there are not a few in the country.”

  The Spaldings’ plight was eerily similar to that of their counterparts at Waiilatpu. The Nez Percé had their own share of dangerous renegades, not just those demanding payment for use of the wood and water on their lands and those who vandalized the mills, broke machinery and windows, cut down precious fruit trees, and disrupted the schoolrooms, but also those threatening physical violence against the white intruders. Spalding wrote in January 1847 that “At one time probably 500 people were collecting threatening to go to my house tie & whip my wife.” He said the Indians were furious because Eliza had summoned a Nez Percé chief to remove from the mission premises two men “who had just presented themselves before the school naked & painted with the most horrible figures, & continued their indecent jestures till Mrs. S. was obliged to leave the house.”

  Elsewhere he wrote of the sad state of their religious work. “I know not there has been a conversion for the last two years,” he wrote in February 1847. “The sabbath which was once very strictly observed, is now generally desecrated.”

  3

  Eighteen forty-six ended with New Mexico conquered and Americans on the march to occupy Los Angeles. The annexation of California would take place six weeks into the new year. There were still nine months of battles to be fought deep into Mexico, but few doubted the outcome of President Polk’s war.

  In the Oregon Country the boundary was settled, and the Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading in Hudson’s Bay had removed to their new post of Victoria on Vancouver Island. The liege lord of the Oregon Country, Dr. John McLoughlin, had retired to private life in Oregon City, and Peter Skene Ogden had taken charge of what Company business remained north of the Columbia. The Americans in the Willamette were preparing memorials to Congress seeking immediate territorial status, composing contracts to bring supplies on American merchant ships coming to the northwest coast, requesting confirmation of the settlers’ land claims, and requesting a railroad, military troops, and steam tugboats and lighthouses for the Columbia estuary.

  News of the boundary treaty had reached the Columbia in the winter that killed half the Donner party in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a winter that proved disastrously bitter on the Columbia as well. The Nez Percé and Cayuse people lost half their horse herds in the arctic-like days, game grew scarce, people starved, and all the while territorial talk spread along the Willamette and to the Whitmans’ station. The suffering Indians were learning that the British had moved out and the Americans were now claiming sovereignty over their lands. Year after year, white men in an endless army were marching in. As yet they had not tarried in Cayuse or Nez Percé country, but how long could the Willamette valley contain them?

  This simmering unrest frowned in the air like a storm cloud. The Spaldings had felt something dire spreading toward them for years and began writing to friends that they might have to move to the Willamette for the safety of their four children. The Whitmans had similar thoughts. In the spring of 1847, fearing that a rising of some kind might be in the offing, the doctor was able to scrape together the funds to purchase the vacated Methodist mission station at The Dalles, intending to move Narcissa and the Waiilatpu furnishings there. The Dalles site was but two days by canoe to the safety of Fort Vancouver, now American property.

  Yet, for all his suspicions and forebodings, Whitman hesitated. The Catholic fathers were building a mission on the Umatilla River, only thirty miles from Waiilatpu, and he could not abide the idea of his Cayuse and Walla Walla students and converts, small in number as they were, falling into the hands of the Romans. He and Narcissa had invested eleven years in their mission and soon, if they held on, an Indian agent of the United States would arrive, perhaps even a military force, and the natives would be quieted, the Protestant missions secured under a real territorial governance.

  Meantime, he was moving milling machinery to his rebuilt gristmill to make flour for the new wave of immigrants. He had much to do, and Narcissa did as well. They would wait awhile.

  * * *

  The first wagons of the 1847 emigration crossed the Blue Mountains in late August, detoured north to the Whitman mission for a rest, and continued on to make camp at The Dalles. They brought with them news gathered on the journey, including estimates that as many as 5,000 settlers would be coming in before the year ended.

  The newcomers, and those who flowed in daily in their wake, had suffered on the Trail, particularly the last few hundred miles of it, and had buried
some of their number en route. They spoke of “mountain fever” as the ailment that had claimed the lives. They were much less concerned over the measles contracted by many of the children and a few adults during the journey; the measles victims ran fevers but recovered.

  What followed, as wagon after wagon rolled across the Blues in the fall and winter months, was unaccountable: The measles, a particularly virulent strain it was said later, became a scourge among the Oregon tribes, obeying what Bancroft called “that inscrutable law of nature which makes it fatal to the dark races to encounter the white race.” The disease spread from The Dalles to Puget Sound and before it ran its course killed thousands of Oregon’s “dark races,” including half of the Cayuse people.

  While nothing could stop it, it became Marcus Whitman’s fate to be the lone physician, and a white one, among a native populace plagued by a white man’s disease. He ministered as best he could with his primitive bag of nostrums, cold compresses, and prayers, but the efforts were futile. No amount of white doctoring cured the white affliction and yet, as quickly became clear to the Indian, the white people were not dying from the disease they called “measles”; only the Indians died of it.

  While Whitman worked himself to exhaustion, his efforts earned no gratitude; the Cayuse regarded him as a failed medicine man and, worse, a sorceror, pretending to help but secretly poisoning their people with his potions so that he, in league with other whites, could steal Indian lands.