One memorial Meek carried was from the officers of the provisional legislature beseeching the federal government to extend to Oregon “the benefit of its laws and protection.” The authors of the document were adamant: They had “called upon the government of the United States so often in vain,” had received too many empty promises, and now, with legislation pending to grant territorial status to Oregon and the Whitman tragedy underscoring the limits to which the Americans there could protect themselves or punish criminals, stated, “We have the right to expect your aid, and you are in duty bound to extend it.” The authors also expressed confidence in the federal government to send them “men of the best talent and most approved integrity” to serve as governor and in the courts regardless of their residency in Oregon or any office presently held. Among the other papers in Meek’s saddlebag was a petition signed by 250 settlers and government officials requesting that the president, upon passage of the territorial bill, appoint Joseph Lafayette Meek United States Marshal of the new Territory of Oregon.
Meek’s orders originally called for him to take a route to California, to deliver messages asking the American military government there for a requisition of arms, and to request that a warship from the United States Pacific Squadron be sent to the Columbia. The mountain man knew his mountains, however, and, to the annoyance of his dispatchers, decided he could not cross the passes into California in the winter snows and would ride east on the Oregon Trail.
He reached Saint Louis on May 17 and proceeded to Washington by steamer and rail purposely wearing his filthy trail outfit of buckskins and moccasins, presenting himself as a ragged but genuine “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of the United States.”
The president received Meek immediately. The normally dour Polk was lighter-hearted, enjoying the final nine months of his term. The war had been won and a treaty signed in which Mexico ceded 40 percent of its territory to the United States. With the Oregon settlement, the country had doubled in size, with 1,200,000 square miles added in three years of war and diplomacy. The paper Joe Meek brought from the place Polk had won but would never see must have seemed a pleasant diversion from the toils of his office. The president saw no obstacle in presenting to Congress the memorial Sara Polk’s reeking relative delivered from the provisional government in Oregon, especially since the matter it contained was by now moot. As for the marshal’s appointment, Meek was told to wait. The president had a job for him.
On August 13, 1848, Polk signed the long-awaited bill creating Oregon Territory.1 There had been some division over it. South Carolina Senator McDuffie said he would not “give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory” but he was in the minority, and the bill sailed through Congress. Five days after the signing, Joe Meek was sworn as United States Marshal and on the twenty-seventh he was given the honor of delivering the governor’s commission to Joseph Lane, a forty-six-year-old brigadier general and hero in the late Mexican War who had started his military career as a private in the Second Indiana Volunteers.
Meek presented the commission to Lane in Indiana, and the two started for Fort Leavenworth on September 10. They avoided the winter snows of South Pass and beyond and turned southward with ten wagons and a party of trappers, wagon masters and teamsters, and twenty-five soldiers, down the Santa Fé Trail. In the New Mexican capital, now American territory, they left the wagons and switched to pack mules as Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny had done in marching his dragoon force to California two years earlier, and followed Kearny’s route down the Rio Grande valley, swinging west to Tucson and the Colorado River. In Los Angeles the Meek-Lane party caught an American warship for passage to San Francisco and reached the mouth of the Columbia on March 3, 1849, one day before President Polk’s term expired.
* * *
The ashes of the Whitman station were still warm when the provisional government of Oregon issued proclamations and posted notices calling for volunteers to form a punitive expedition against the Cayuse. Two hundred and thirty men responded to the first call, and 500 would eventually be formed into companies of a regiment of Oregon Mounted Riflemen to take part in the campaign. They were loosely organized and poorly led, as might have been expected of a force of volunteer farmers, hunters, trappers, clerks, mill workers, drifters, and militiamen, but they had a single nine-pounder cannon contributed by Oregon City and a single-mindedness in their mission to punish the savages behind the Waiilatpu atrocities.
The “Cayuse War” consisted of a strung-out series of horseback pursuits and small scuffles from The Dalles, headquarters for the volunteers, along the Umatilla into the Snake River country, southeast into the Blue Mountains, and north beyond Fort Walla Walla, close to the juncture of the Snake and the Columbia, where the Palouse tribe harbored some of the fleeing marauders. The volunteers had no supply train and had to live off the country until returning to headquarters or reaching a farmhouse along the route. The wildest of the skirmishes lasted minutes and resulted in little more than an expenditure of precious ammunition. The war itself produced more rumors than casualties. The Nez Percé, Walla Wallas, and Yakimas were said to be in league with and harboring the outlaws. The Cayuse miscreants were sighted as far east along the Snake as Fort Hall, as far west as the Pacific coast, hiding among the Chinooks. Some suggested the culprits may have gone into Utah to seek protection among the Mormons.
Governor Lane made the difference. The year following his arrival in Oregon, he devoted to bringing the killers to justice, negotiating with tribal elders for the voluntary delivery of the culprits for trial. He was a skillful diplomat and his work reached fruition in the spring of 1850, when he traveled to The Dalles with a military escort to receive the prisoners. There were five of them: Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, the best known of the raiders; and men named Klokamas, Isaiachakalis, and Kiamasumpkin. To the infinite regret of all, Joe Lewis had escaped capture and disappeared from Oregon and from the historical record. Some Oregonians believed he was killed in one of the punitive raids, others say he died at the hands of the Nez Percé, or, even more satisfactory, was killed by the Cayuse for sowing the seeds of their destruction.
The Cayuse prisoners were questioned closely en route to Oregon City, where they would stand trial. When offered food by Lane’s escort Tiloukaikt said, “What hearts have you to offer to eat with me, whose hands are red with your brothers’ blood?” and when asked why he surrendered, said, “Did not your missionaries teach us that Christ died to save his people? So we die to save our people.”
The trial opened on May 22 with the Indians defended by the secretary of the Territory and three army legal officers, and prosecuted by the newly arrived district attorney. John McLoughlin, who had warned the Whitmans of the perils of trying to work among such truculent savages, appeared to testify against the condemned.
The proceeding was brief but dignified; the defendants were all convicted and sentenced to death by hanging by the trial judge, O. C. Pratt, originally of Ontario County, New York, a distinguished lawyer with, according to H. H. Bancroft, “analytic intelligence” and “fine sensibilities.”
On June 3, 1850, before much of the white population of Oregon City and some who had traveled far for the witnessing, the condemned men mounted a scaffold built to hang them simultaneously. A Catholic father, who had given the men the sacraments of baptism and confirmation in their cells, attended them on the gallows with the prayer, “Onward, onward to heaven, children; into Thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commend my spirit.”
Joe Meek, United States Marshal of Oregon Territory, served as executioner and years later recalled the moment.
“I brought forth the five prisoners,” he said, “and placed them on the drop. Here the chief, who had always declared his innocence, Kiamasumpkin, begged me to kill him with my knife—for an Indian fears to be hanged—but I soon put an end to his entreaties by cutting the rope which held the drop with my tomahawk. As I said, ‘the Lord have mercy on your souls,’ the trap fe
ll and the five Cayuses hung in the air.”
Three of the five died instantly; the other two struggled, Meek said, “the Little Chief, Tomahas, the longest. It was he who was cruel to my little girl at the time of the massacre; so I just put my foot on the knot to tighten it, and he got quiet.”
Most of the surviving Cayuse people, weakened by disease and reduced to small, scattered groups, were moved to a reservation with the Umatillas in 1855; others melded into the Nez Percé, Yakima, Palouse, and other tribes.
The Cayuse had lived in the region between the Walla Walla and Umatilla Rivers for five centuries before, in Bancroft’s words, the “Juggernaut of an incomprehensible civilization” under “whose wheels they were compelled to prostrate themselves to that relentless law, the survival of the fittest, before which in spite of religion or science, we all in turn go down.”
2
An important postmortem to the Whitman tragedy came about when Narcissa Whitman’s sister, Miss Jane Prentiss, wrote a letter in 1849 seeking an answer to the question that had caused her family such anguish: “Why did the Indians kill my sister and her husband who had done so much for them?”
She directed her inquiry to Reverend H. K. W. Perkins, Methodist missionary at the Waskopum station at The Dalles, with whom Marcus Whitman often visited in his travels to and from the Willamette valley. Perkins had visited Waiilatpu as well, and seems to have known both Whitmans intimately, the reason, no doubt, that Jane Prentiss sought his counsel.
Perkins answered her question with great clarity, underlining words and phrases for emphasis, and with forthrightness; more of it, perhaps, than Miss Prentiss anticipated.
He said the Whitmans “were out of their proper sphere” in mission work. Marcus was “perfectly fearless and independent” but had no talent for patient talk with the Indians, “could never stop to parley,” and saw no gray areas between yes and no. The Indians feared him, Perkins said, but he “never identified himself with the natives as to make their interests paramount.” Dr. Whitman, he said, had “no sense of personal dignity—manners, I mean,” presumably referring to Whitman’s habitual slovenliness of dress, and was “always at work,” but not necessarily at religious and educational efforts among his Indian charges. The result, he said, was that the Cayuse “began to suspect that he was more interested in the white man than in them.”
Narcissa, Perkins wrote, “felt a deep interest in the welfare of the natives,” but was considered by them to be “haughty” and “very proud.” He concluded that she “was not adapted to savage but civilized life. She would have done honor to her sex in a polished & exalted sphere.” Her death, he said, “was her misfortune, not her fault. She was adapted to a different destiny. She wanted something exalted—communion with mind. She longed for society, refined society.”
He concluded his extraordinary analysis by saying of Narcissa, “The self-denial that took her away [from refined society] was suicidal.… She was not a missionary, but a woman, a highly gifted, polished American lady. And as such she died.”
* * *
After the Waiilatpu massacre and the closing of their Lapwai mission, Henry and Eliza Spalding took up residence in the Willamette valley. He seemed to be searching for answers to the question Jane Prentiss posed when, with a group of Presbyterian adherents, he opened an attack on those he considered to be at the source of the tragedy: the Catholic clergy.
Spalding’s letters appeared in the Oregon American, a small monthly paper printed in Oregon City on a handmade press. He asserted that not only the nefarious Joe Lewis but also certain Jesuits who arrived at Fort Walla Walla in September 1847 had spread the lethal lie among the Cayuse that the Americans had brought the measles plague to kill them so that their lands could be confiscated. The missionary, and others supporting his viewpoint, maintained that the Jesuit clergy had conspired with the Indians to destroy all the Protestant missions.
“All were termed Jesuits,” Bancroft wrote angrily on this episode, “whether Jesuit, secular, or Oblate; and fertile imaginations, half crazed by horrors, were sown with suspicions the foulest and most unnatural.”
The charges, examples of the dread of “Romanism” and “Popish designs” among the Protestant missionaries, did not reflect well upon Spalding’s otherwise excellent record of work and sacrifice among the Nez Percé, Bancroft said; indeed, he wrote, “The mere intimation of such atrocity exposes the heart of those who made them.” Nor did the campaign in the short-lived Oregon American (it lasted six issues) come to anything, least of all an investigation. “The Presbyterians blamed the Catholics, and the Catholics blamed the devil,” the historian summed up, “for what the exercise of ordinary good judgment ought to have averted, but which sectarian pride and obstinacy resolved to dare rather than avoid.”
When Eliza Spalding died at the age of forty-eight on January 7, 1851, the 200-word epitaph her husband composed for her tombstone told of her birth and marriage, their crossing of the Rocky Mountains with the Whitmans in 1836, Eliza and Narcissa being the first women to do so, and their devoted labors among the Indians until “Dr. and Mrs. Whitman and 12 others were cruelly massacred by the Cayuse Indians.” She hoped that their mission might be resumed, the inscription went on, “but the shock of the massacre and the trial and suffering occasioned by those sad events, laid the foundation for the sickness, which finally caused her death.” All this was followed by the sentence, “She always felt that the Jesuit missionaries were the leading cause of the massacre.”
Henry Spalding remarried in 1853 and returned to Lapwai in 1871 at the behest of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. He was greeted enthusiastically by the Nez Percé and claimed to have baptized 1,000 Indians during his tour.
He also paid a memorial visit to the Waiilatpu ruins and saw that it had become a place of rye grass again.
At his home in Kamiah, Idaho, he baptized a Cayuse chief with the Christian name Marcus Whitman, and the chief’s wife as Narcissa Whitman.
Spalding died at Lapwai on August 3, 1874, and in 1913, Eliza’s remains were moved there and reburied alongside her husband’s. The old accusatory tombstone had been destroyed and a new monument placed over their graves.
3
Francis Parkman’s “A Summer Journey Out of Bounds by a Bostonian” began appearing serially in Knickerbocker Magazine in February 1847, at the time when rescuers were reaching the appalling camp of the Donner party in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and completed its twenty-one-issue run in February 1849. By then, the Mormons had reached their Salt Lake valley Zion, the Whitmans and Waiilatpu were no more, Oregon had been declared a Territory of the United States, the War with Mexico had ended, John Jacob Astor had died,2 and the argonauts were on the march to the gold diggings in California.
Parkman had returned in October 1846, and for a time he had no trails to follow other than the dimly lit paths through his Beacon Hill home, those between the furrows of his rose garden, and, when he became Harvard’s first professor of horticulture, the walkway to his office in Cambridge.
The Oregon Trail adventure had not revived his failing health as he had hoped. His eyesight had worsened; impaired during his law studies, it had become permanently damaged, his physicians said, by the merciless prairie sun. His heart palpitations had returned too, and he had agonizing headaches—suspected at first to derive from a cranial tumor—and insomnia.
But while his eyes never improved, Parkman’s other problems seemed intermittent. He regained his strength after periods when he had to lie abed or hobble about on two canes to tend to his garden or find his research materials for his daily writing stint, then he would lose it again. He became resigned to a life as a semi-invalid and bore it with courage and humor. Once, when a doctor remarked on his “strong constitution,” he said sadly, “I’m afraid that’s true.”
Outwardly, at least, he seemed resigned to his handicaps and serene, and found ways to work. In writing his Oregon Trail series for the Knickerbocker, his sister and his frien
d and traveling companion Quincy Shaw read his rough journal notes to him as he convalesced. He digested them, composed paragraphs in his head, and dictated them to his volunteer scribes. In later years he most often wrote in semidarkness using a contraption he devised and called a “noctograph” consisting of a wooden frame with wires stretched across it to support his hand and guide his pen so that he could write with his eyes closed. There were times when headaches and listlessness from insomnia kept him from writing more than a half-hour in a day, times when his daily production was as little as six lines, and times when he wrote prodigiously.
He remained frail all his life, his health and strength fluctuating from despairing periods in bed with his writing frame propped before him to periods when he could work outdoors, teach at Harvard, make research voyages to Europe, and even have a social life. His students and friends saw him as a convivial host, an uncomplaining, modest, and friendly man.
Few of those close to Parkman in the early years following his Oregon Trail experience believed he would live to write the books he planned in his Harvard days; indeed, many of his close associates believed he would soon tire of chronic invalidism and welcome death, and the journal of his one great exploit would be his first and only book, monument enough for this courageous man.
What no one counted on was his obstinacy, his ability to discover new passions that invigorated him and to rediscover old ones that inspired his will to live and work.
Even so, probably no one was more surprised than Parkman that he would outlive his Oregon Trail journey by forty-three years and write all the books, and a few others, he aspired to write. There were to be twelve volumes under the general title France and England in America, the first of which, History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, appearing in 1851, he had mentally outlined before he set out with Quincy Shaw for Fort Laramie. He wrote seven other historical books, including Montcalm and Wolfe generally regarded to be his finest work in 1884, The Book of Roses, and even a novel.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 42
