Unsettled Ground by Cassandra Tate

Author:Cassandra Tate [Tate, Cassandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

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Within weeks of Marcus Whitman’s departure for Boston, rumors began to circulate among the Cayuse about the purpose of his trip. Some said he had gone east to get soldiers who would force the Indians off the land and enslave them; others said he had gone to get poison to kill them all. The Cayuse had heard stories from Iroquois and Algonquian people about lives lost to disease and land lost to greed when Americans came into their ancestral lands. A Delaware Indian known as Tom Hill or Delaware Tom warned the Nez Perce, who warned the Cayuse, that the missionaries would bring in many more whites who would take land and not pay for it.24 “They have heard that you have gone home and are coming back next fall with fifty men to fight them,” Narcissa reported in a letter to her husband, sent to him in care of David Greene in Boston.25 The rumors fed on each other, in a petri dish of suspicion and distrust.

William Geiger, the caretaker at Waiilatpu, sent alarming reports about “the excitement” to Narcissa at the Methodist mission. He said some of the young Cayuse were talking about going to war against “the Bostons” (a term for Americans) and were held back only by the counsel of older men. Frissons of panic spread from the missionaries at The Dalles to Oregon City, the center of white settlement in the Willamette Valley, and to Elijah White, newly ensconced there as the dubiously commissioned “sub-Indian agent.” Oregon City, near the falls of the Willamette River, was a hamlet of perhaps seventy people. Nervous residents demanded that White either fortify the town to fend off an attack or gather a militia and march inland to subdue the restive Cayuse by force. “If words would not answer,” Narcissa wrote to Mary Walker, at the American Board’s mission at Tshimakain, the plan was to “make powder and balls do it.”26

Elijah White arrived at the Whitman Mission in late May 1843 for a council with the Cayuse and Walla Walla. He had held a similar meeting with the Nez Perce at Lapwai five months earlier. White’s objective in both cases was twofold: to impose “laws” protecting missionaries and other white people; and to convince the Indians to adopt a system of leadership that would make it easier for whites to deal with them. Joining him at Waiilatpu were a reluctant Narcissa, two of her Methodist hosts, and Henry Spalding, who traveled down from Lapwai with a large party of Nez Perces. Two Christianized Nez Perce leaders, known to whites as Ellis and Lawyer, served as the main interpreters.

An estimated three hundred Cayuse and Walla Walla men showed up to hear what Elijah White had to say. He began by asking them to accept the “Laws of the Nez Perces,” so-called because they had been nominally adopted by the Nez Perce during the council at Lapwai. Spalding, who had probably written most of the “laws” himself, had printed them in an eight-page booklet.

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