perhaps of her own child drowned when very small: “Husband thought we could get along with all but the baby—he did not see how we could take that, but I felt that if I must take any I wanted her as a chain to bind the rest to me.” . . . And now it is night and she and her husband are both dead. The little thirteen-year-old adopted Sager is left to tell the rest of the story:
“I had always been very much afraid of the dark, but now I felt that the darkness was a protection to us, and I prayed that it might always remain so. I dreaded the coming of the daylight; . . . I heard the cats racing about and squalling. . . . I remember yet how terrible the striking of the clock sounded. Occasionally Mr. Kimball [a wounded man] would ask if I were asleep. . . .”
In the morning: “The children . . . renewed their calls for water. Day began to break, and Mr. K. told me to take a sheet off the bed and bind up his arm, and he would try and get them some. I arose stiff with cold, and with a dazed uncertain feeling . . . I said, ‘Mother [Mrs. Whitman] would not like to have the sheets torn up.’ Looking at me he said, ‘Child, don’t you know your mother is dead, and will never have any use for the sheets?’ I seemed to be dreaming . . . I took a sheet from the bed and tore off some strips, which, by his directions, I wound around his arm. He then told me to put a blanket around him, as he might faint on the way and not be able to get up, and would suffer from the cold. Taking a pair of blankets from the bed, I put them around him, tying them around the waist with a strip off the sheets. I then placed his hat on his head and he went downstairs. We waited long for him, but . . . we never saw him again alive.”
Later in the day, the Indians arrived and went off again and when the house seemed empty the children ventured downstairs. “The Indians had spread quilts over the corpses. Mary Ann, my sister, lifted the quilt from Dr. Whitman’s face, and said, ‘Oh girls, come and see father.’ We did so and saw a sight we will never forget.”
The final episodes of the Whitman story cover the captivity of the women and children, the killing of invalids in their beds. Girls of likely age were appropriated by the chiefs; one in particular, Lorinda Bewley, going down in history for her spirited resistance to her fate; a resistance, which, in the end, availed her little, except that two chiefs contended for the honor of having her; and while the Cayuse went off to get a wagon and rope to transport the fiery girl, a Umatilla came and took her away.
Down the years it is hard to realize the terrifying effect of the murder of the Whitmans at Waiilatpu on the Oregon settlers at that time. They were only a handful of people in an unfamiliar country; and they realized that if the miscreants went unpunished no isolated community would be safe in the future. Organizing an army, equipping it and outfitting it, was a very difficult task in 1847 in a country which was still loosely organized, without adequate supplies—where indeed “wheat and promises” were legal tender. Furthermore there was good reason to believe that their own government— the United States—was coolly indifferent to their fate. Nevertheless they dispatched Joe Meek, the hardy mountain man, overland from Oregon to the capital three thousand miles away to bear the news of the tragedy; an embassy under Jesse Applegate set out for California to ask help but had to turn back because of the impassable snows in the Siskiyous; there was no vessel going out to San Francisco all that winter; the only boat out of the Columbia was one bound for Hawaii which carried the news there and explained the emergency.
After a winter campaign of great hardship and many months of dickering, some Cayuses were hanged in Oregon City for the murder of the Whitmans. There seems doubt—as there was always doubt at Indian executions— whether these were really the guilty ones. Ironically enough it was the Catholic fathers who attended them to the scaffold.
The success of the Catholic missionaries among the Indians would seem to have been a matter of psychological understanding of the Indian nature. Priests were credited with such utterances as “Noise is essential to the Indian’s enjoyment” and “Without singing the best instruction is of little value.” A Catholic priest invented the Catholic ladder, a diagram of the mysteries of the church presented in simple chronological order by which the competitive red man could measure his advance in piety. On special occasions like Easter the Indian was allowed to express his pleasure in his adopted white deity after his own fashion, and did so with green boughs, plumes, drums, bells, and occasional counterpoint of piercing yells.
The Catholic insistence on the objectifying of the mysteries undoubtedly made a deep appeal to the Indian with his worship not only of the Great Power but of lesser powers—any object which carried a quality of the supernatural. A Catholic missionary in the early days reported finding in one Indian tribe, in the high arid lands to the east, a spotted calico shirt and a white robe. These sacred objects had been obtained from a white man whom the Indians had seen wearing the garments, which they took to be respectively the manitou of the spotted disease (smallpox) which had killed such alarming numbers of them, and the manitou of the snow. Possession of these rare objects was obtained by the barter of a number of their best horses, and for many years the sacred articles were carried to the place of ritual and there worshipped with the smoking of the great medicine pipe— an offering to earth, sun, and water—and with appropriate dancing and singing. By this worship the Indians hoped to prevent the return of the disease and to bring a snow heavy enough to push the buffalo down from the mountains.
The Indians liked instances of the intervention of the white man’s Higher Spirit in matters of daily life; and the successful crossing of the Columbia bar in a great storm in the forties gave the priest and six nuns aboard the vessel a special distinction as bearers of magic power.
The early Catholic fathers were often men of cultivation and remarkable strength of character. Among them the names of Blanchet and de Smet stand first. Both men endured untold hardships with great courage and vigor. Both made trips to Europe to arouse interest in this remote part of the world and brought back bands of nuns and priests for the new field. Of de Smet it is said that his travels, at a time in history when travel entailed nothing but endurance, totaled from seven to nine times round the earth. He crossed the Atlantic nineteen times, made one trip round the Horn and two by way of Panama. He once fasted thirty days before taking a sixty-mile snowshoe trip for which he needed to reduce his weight, and when threatened by a hostile Indian was able to knock the weapon from his hand, throw him, and give him a sound beating with a riding whip, which summary treatment brought the Indian as a convert to the church.
De Smet was also a man of delicate sensibilities, particularly susceptible to the charms of nature and able to express his feeling for it in such phrases as “the rock-hung flower” and, with reference to his own desert home in the drylands of this territory, “a little Arabia shut in by stern Heaven-built walls of rock.” Although he mourned the Indians’ inability to discard their superstitions he is himself reported to have considered a severe illness the punishment for his “too carnal admiration of nature.”
Although the old missions have sunk into ruins, the few descriptions that remain of these oases of garden and brook in the midst of a wild uncultivated country convey a slumbrous charm. In the correspondence of the wife of General Stevens, the first governor of the Territory of Washington, there is such a description of the mission St. Joseph d’Olympia:
“I also had a boat built in which I made excursions down the Sound. About two miles down there was a Catholic mission, a large dark house or monastery, surrounded by cultivated land, a fine garden in front filled with flowers, bordered on one side, next the water, with immense bushes of wall flowers in bloom; the fragrance resembling the sweet English violet, filling the air with its delicious odor. Father Ricard, the venerable head of this house, was from Paris. He had lived in this place more than twenty years. He had with him Father Blanchet, a short thickset man, who managed everything pertaining to the temporal comfort of the mission. Under him were servants who were employed in various ways, baking, cooking, digging and planting. Their fruit was excellent and a great rarity, as there was but one more orchard in the whole country. There was a large number of Flatheads settled about them, who had been taught to count their beads, say prayers,
