The Whitman massacre (also known as the Whitman killings and the Tragedy at Waiilatpu) was the killing of American missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, along with eleven others, on November 29, 1847. They were killed by a small group of Cayuse men who suspected that Whitman had poisoned the 200 Cayuse in his medical care during an outbreak of measles that included the Whitman household. The killings occurred at the Whitman Mission at the junction of the Walla Walla River and Mill Creek in what is now southeastern Washington near Walla Walla. The massacre became a decisive episode in the U.S. settlement of the Pacific Northwest, causing the United States Congress to take action declaring the territorial status of the Oregon Country. The Oregon Territory was established on August 14, 1848, to protect the white settlers.
The massacre is usually ascribed to the inability of Whitman, a physician, to prevent the measles outbreak. Cayuse in at least three villages held Whitman responsible for the widespread epidemic that killed hundreds of Cayuse while leaving settlers comparatively unscathed. Some Cayuse accused settlers of poisoning them so they could take their land. In the trial of five Cayuse accused of the killing, they used the defense that it was tribal law to kill the medicine man who gives bad medicine.
Today, the Cayuse are one of three tribes comprising the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR).
Background
Sahaptin nations came into direct contact with White colonizers several decades before the arrival of the members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). These relations set expectations among the Cayuse for how exchanges and dialogue with Whites would operate. Primarily the early Euro-Americans engaged in the North American fur trade and the maritime fur trade. Marine captains regularly gave small gifts to indigenous merchants as a means to encourage commercial transactions. Later land-based trading posts, operated by the Pacific Fur Company, the North West Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company, regularized economic and cultural exchanges, including gift giving. Interactions were not always peaceful. Native Americans suspected that the Whites had power over the new diseases that they suffered. Reports from the period note that members of the Umpqua, Makah, and Chinookan nations faced threats of destruction through settler-carried illnesses, as the natives had no immunity to these new infectious diseases. After becoming the premier fur gathering operation in the region, the HBC continued to develop ties on the Columbian Plateau.
Historian Cameron Addis recounted that after 1840, much of the Columbian Plateau was no longer important in the fur trade and that:
... most of its people were not dependent on agriculture, but traders had spread Christianity for thirty years. When Catholic and Protestant missionaries arrived they met Indians already content with their blend of Christianity and native religions, skeptical toward farming, and wary of the Whites' apparent power to inflict diseases. Local Indians expected trade and gifts (especially tobacco) as part of any interaction with Whites, religious or medical.
Establishment of the mission
Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman journeyed overland in 1835 from the Rocky Mountains into portions of the modern states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington to locate potential mission locations. Parker hired a translator from Pierre-Chrysologue Pambrun, manager of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) trading post Fort Nez Percés. He wanted help in consulting with the elite of the Liksiyu (Cayuse) and Niimíipu (Nez Perce) in order to identify particular places for missions and Christian proselytizing.
During specific negotiations over what became the Whitman Mission, six miles from the site of the present-day city of Walla Walla, Washington, Parker told the assembled Cayuse men that:
I do not intend to take your lands for nothing. After the Doctor [Whitman] is come, [sic] there will come every year a big ship, loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. Those goods will not be sold, but given to you. The missionaries will bring you plows and hoes, to teach you how to cultivate the land, and they will not sell, but give them to you."
Whitman returned the following year with his wife, Narcissa, mechanic William H. Gray, and the missionary couple Rev. Henry Spalding and Eliza Hart Spalding. The wives were the first known White American women to enter the Pacific Northwest overland. HBC Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin advised against the missionaries residing on the Columbia Plateau, but offered material support for their venture regardless. In particular, he allowed the women to reside at Fort Vancouver that winter as the men went to begin work on constructing the Waiilatpu Mission.
Because the beaver population of the Columbian Plateau had declined, British fur trading activities were being curtailed. Despite this, the HBC practices during previous decades shaped the perceptions and expectations of the Cayuse in relation to the missionaries. Whitman was frustrated because the Cayuse always emphasized commercial exchanges. In particular, they requested that he purchase their stockpiles of beaver skins, at rates comparable to those at Fort Nez Percés. The Mission supplies were, in general, not appealing enough to the Sahaptin to serve as compensation for their labor. Whitman lacked sizable stockpiles of gunpowder, tobacco, or clothing, so he had to assign most labor to Hawaiian Kanakas (who had settled after working as sailors) or Whites. To bolster food supplies for the first winter, Whitman purchased several horses from the Cayuse. Additionally, the initial plowing of the Waiilatpu farm was done primarily with draft animals loaned by a Cayuse noble and Fort Nez Percés.
The missionary family suffered from a lack of privacy, as the Cayuse thought nothing of entering their quarters. Narcissa complained that the kitchen was "always filled with four or five or more Indians--men especially--at meal time ... " and said that once a room was established specifically for Indigenous that the missionaries would "not permit them to go into the other part of the house at all ... ". According to Narcissa, the Natives were "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go ... " She wrote that "we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard."
In the beginning of 1842, when the Cayuse returned to the vicinity of Waiilatpu after winter, the Whitmans told the tribesmen to establish a house of worship for their use. The Cayuse noblemen disagreed, stating that the existing mission buildings were sufficient. The Whitmans tried to explain that "we could not have them worship there for they would make it so dirty and fill it so full of fleas that we could not live in it." The Cayuse who visited the Whitmans found Narcissa's haughtiness and Marcus' refusal to hold sermons in the mission household to be rude.
Land ownership dispute
The Cayuse allowed construction of the mission, in the belief that Parker's promises still held. During the summer of 1837, a year after construction had started, the Whitmans were called upon to make due payment. The chief who owned the surrounding land was named Umtippe. Whitman balked at his demands and refused to fulfill the agreement, insisting that the land had been granted to him free of charge.
Umtippe returned the following winter to again demand payment, along with medical attention for his sick wife. He informed Whitman that "Doctor, you have come here to give us bad medicines; you come to kill us, and you steal our lands. You had promised to pay me every year, and you have given me nothing. You had better go away; if my wife dies, you shall die also." Cayuse men continued to complain to HBC traders of Whitman's refusal to pay for using their land and of his preferential treatment of incoming White colonists.
In particular, the Cayuse leader impeded Gray's cutting of timber intended for various buildings at Waiilatpu. He demanded payment for the lumber and firewood gathered by the missionaries. These measures were intended to delay the use of the wood resources, as a settler in the Willamette Valley had suggested to the noble that he would establish a trading post in the vicinity. During 1841, Tiloukaikt kept his horses within the Waiilatpu farm, earning Whitman's enmity as the horses destroyed the maize crop.
Whitman claimed that the farmland was specifically for the mission and not for roving horses. Tiloukaikt told the doctor " ... that this was his land, that he grew up here and that the horses were only eating up the growth of the soil; and demanded of me what I had ever paid him for the land." Aghast at the demands, Whitman told Tiloukaikt that "I never would give him anything ... " During the start of 1842, Narcissa reported that the Cayuse leaders "said we must pay them for their land we lived on." A common complaint was that Whitman sold wheat to settlers, while giving none to the Cayuse landholders and demanding payment from them for using his grist mill.
Conversion efforts
The Catholic Church dispatched two priests in 1838 from the Red River Colony to minister to the spiritual needs of both the regional Indigenous and Catholic settlers. François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers arrived at Fort Nez Percés on 18 November 1839. This began a long-lasting competition between the ABCFM and the Catholic missionaries to convert the Sahaptin peoples to Christianity. While Blanchet and Demers were at the trading post for one day, they preached to an assembled group of Walla Wallas and Cayuse. Blanchet would later allege that Whitman had ordered local natives against attending their service. Whitman contacted the agent McLoughlin to complain of the Catholic activity. McLoughlin responded saying he had no oversight of the priests, but would advise them to avoid the Waiilaptu area.
The rival missionaries competed for the attention of Cayuse noble Tawatoy. He was present when the Catholic priests held their first Mass at Fort Nez Percés. Demers returned to the trading post for two weeks in the summer of 1839. One of Tawatoy's sons was baptized at this time and Pierre-Chrysologue Pambrun was named as his godfather. According to Whitman, the Catholic priest forbade Tawatoy from visiting him. While Tawatoy did occasionally visit Whitman, he avoided the Protestant's religious services. Also, the headman gave the Catholics a small house which Pambrun had built for him, for their use for religious services.
After Demers left the area in 1840, Whitman preached to assembled Cayuse on several occasions, saying that they were in a "lost ruined and condemned state ... in order to remove the hope that worshipping will save them." While he faced threats of violence for denying the power of worship, Whitman continued to tell the Cayuse that their interpretation of Christianity was wrong.
Whitman had opposed closing the Waiilatpu Mission, as suggested by Asa Bowen Smith in 1840, because he thought it would allow "the Catholics to unite all the [Pacific] coast from California to the North ... " Religious strife continued between the two Christian denominations. Cayuse and related natives "brought under papal influences" was, according to the ABCFM board, "manifest less confidence in the ceremonies of that delusive system." Despite this claim, in 1845 the board admitted that no Cayuse had formally joined the churches maintained by ABCFM missionaries.
Henry Spalding and other anti-Catholic ministers later claimed that the Whitman killings were instigated by Catholic priests. According to their accounts, the Catholics may have told the Cayuse that Whitman had caused disease among their people and incited them to attack. Spalding and other Protestant ministers suggested that the Catholics wanted to take over the Protestant mission, which Whitman had refused to sell to them. They accused Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet of being a party to such provocations.
Agriculture
Whitman and his fellow missionaries urged the adjacent Plateau peoples to learn to adopt European-American style agriculture, and settle on subsistence farms. This topic was a common theme in their dispatches to the Secretary of ABCFM, Rev. David Greene. Trying to persuade the Cayuse to abandon their seasonal migrations consumed much of Whitman's time. He believed that if they would cultivate their food supply through farming, they would remain in the vicinity of Waiilaptu. He told his superiors that if the Cayuse would abandon their habit of relocating during the winter, he could spend more time proselytizing among them. In particular, Whitman told Rev. Green that " ... although we bring the gospel as the first object we cannot gain an assurance unless they are attracted and retained by the plough and hoe ... "