Early relationships between European newcomers and Native Americans living in the Pacific Northwest certainly went no better than in most other regions of the Americas.  European supremacy became much easier through early introduction of disease, an actual prelude in many cases to actual ethnic introductions.  Bad as the era directly before the two peoples came together face to face was, disease continued to inflict the Native populations, a factor leading directly to ill will and what became known as the “Cayuse War” in 1847.

DISEASE RUNS AHEAD OF ENOCOUNTER

Disease often ran ahead of actual direct interaction between peoples through trade.  Infectious diseases, dormant in the Europeans, spread quickly from Native traders through their populations.  A total lack of immunity on the part of the Native Americans killed huge numbers of people.  It is estimated a quarter to a half of the population of central Mexico died from a smallpox epidemic around 1519.   Disease spread from European to one Native group after another.  Epidemics in many cases ran far in front of actual interactions. 

Local tribes in the Northwest lost up to 90% of their peoples from the infections making it much easier for Europeans to colonize the relatively empty Northwestern scene – the “virgin wilderness”.  One epidemic followed another.  The local Natives lacking immunity died in droves, while some of those who survived did so with disabilities from blindness to scarred features causing psychological infirmity and suicide.  Estimates of at least 30% of the Northwestern populations of Native Americans died in smallpox epidemics during the 1770’s long before Lewis and Clark made their way west.  One estimate of a pre-contact population of 32,000 was reduced to 2,100 by the late 1830’s.

AFFECTS ON SURVIVORS

Death of so many had a huge indirect effect on those left behind.  Fewer people to support the tribe and loss of knowledge further weakening the community.  The next epidemic became just that much more effective in reducing numbers.  Infectious diseases led to chronic diseases like tuberculosis which would continue to affect the communities.

Some diseases during the early times of contact affected both European and Native communities such as malaria.  In 1832 at Fort Vancouver, 137 out of 140 people were stricken by the disease though only a few died.  In 1847-1858 measles ravaged the Cayuse tribe located in the mid-Columbia area.  Children were especially affected.

ENTER THE WHITMANS

Marcus and his wife Narcissa had come west in 1836 founding a mission – Waiilatpu – just west of present-day Walla Walla.  Products of the Second Awakening in New York, the couple hoped to Christianize the Cayuse.  They came with other missionaries including Henry and Eliza Spalding who ended up living further to the east among the Nez Perce founding the mission at Lapwai.  The Whitman’s created a small community farming, providing medical care and a school for Native children.

Narcissa grew up with a strong desire to become a missionary, but she first needed to find a husband.  The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Protestant organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, did not initially send single women out on their own.

Marcus became first a doctor, but he also got bit by the desire to spread the Christian message to the un-Christian world.  Married missionaries, even among men, were considered stronger candidates than single men.  Marcus and Narcissa married just before making their trip west.

The Spalding’s joined them at the last moment.  Another couple scheduled to journey with the Whitman’s were re-routed to another destination.  Needing another couple to join them – otherwise, their trip faced a one-year postponement – the Spalding’s were also heading to Kansas for a mission to the Natives there.

Initial Problems

Narcissa knew Henry Spalding from worshipping at the same church in western New York State.  There seem to be two veins of thought regarding their relationship. One view is she knew him too well.  According to one of her younger sisters reporting events at the end of the 19th century, she turned down a wedding proposal from Henry while still in her late teens.  Time supposedly heals wounds or so she thought when she wrote the Spalding’s inviting them to join them for the trip west.

Still in keeping with this view, she was wrong.  Spalding never forgave Narcissa and never forgot.  His constant bickering towards her made the trip tortuous for all.  The long trip became even longer. Finally reaching Oregon country – politically, the land was still shared by Britain and the United States – the Whitman’s went to minister to the Cayuse tribe on the lower Walla Walla River at Waiilatpu while the Spalding’s went 150 miles to the east to the Nez Perce tribe at Lapwai.

A second view related in Cassandra Tate’s Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West, claims the idea of a frustrated sexual triangle to lack any basis. The sister is in question, Tate says, she was too young to know of any details of her older sister’s life, especially nearly sixty years after the fact.

A big problem arose from the start of the mission at Waiilatpu.  The Cayuse expected rent in return for allowing the mission to take place.  This became more problematic as time went on especially as the mission grew.

CHANGE OF MISSION

The Whitman mission was one of four sponsored by the ABCMF.  The four were widely spread apart manned by missionaries constantly at odds with each other, especially dissension between Lapwai and Waiilatpu.  Three of the missions, including both Waiilatpu and Lapwai were ordered closed in February 1842 with the Whitman’s reassigned to the remaining mission near Spokane.  It took seven months for the message to reach the West.

Making a dangerous winter trip, Marcus went east to argue for a new and different role for the mission.  Waiilatpu was now a re-supply stop for westward-bound emigrants.  To give up the fight would simply allow nearby Catholic priests to take over.

His trip to the East would later be re-interpreted as an attempt to save Oregon from the British, which is simply not true.

Troubles Boil up

1843 saw maybe 100 pioneers making the 2,000-mile journey from Missouri to Oregon.  Most of the emigrants trooped through the Cayuse lands stopping at Waiilatpu before the final push to the west.  The Cayuse were not too thrilled seeing the scarce resources made scarcer by the American wagons and cattle. As more emigrants came through, scarce resources – grass for grazing, wild game, firewood were all depleted.  Many settlers overwintered at the mission, exhausted from their long overland journey.  More buildings were built, and fences sprang up.

When Marcus went east on his journey to save the Waiilatpu mission, things were already perilous.  Narcissa, not feeling safe in her husband’s absence, went downriver to spend time at the Methodist mission at Wascopam – The Dalles.  The grist mill at Waiilatpu was burned at the behest of local Cayuse. They were unhappy with more and more white settlers coming through their lands.

More and more

In 1844, the year of Marcus’ return trip, almost 1,000 took part. Migration, a result of economic depression in the United States to the east.  He came with one of the first wagon trains of the year.  The successful emigrations of the year proved the Oregon Trail doable for those inclined to seek a new life in the west.  Whitman’s thinking changed from the conversion of the Natives to “our greatest work is to aid the white settlement of this country.”  1845 saw the number of emigrants double again. 

More European settlers did not set well with the local Cayuse.  As more emigrants came through, scarce resources – grass for grazing, wild game, firewood were all depleted.  Many settlers overwintered at the mission, exhausted from their long overland journey.  More buildings were built, and fences sprang up.

MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS AND AN END TO A BEGINNING

The measles epidemic of 1847 coincided with the European encroachment – over 4,000 settlers reached Oregon the same year.  Both European and Cayuse suffered, but most of the Europeans survived.  Half of the Cayuse and most of their children died.  The disparity led some among the Cayuse to blame the Whitman’s for the deaths.  Healers in the Cayuse world who did not heal could suffer the consequences.

On 29 November 1847, Cayuse warriors, egged on by Joe Lewis, a disgruntled half Native the Whitman’s had earlier taken in, killed the Whitman’s and twelve other white settlers in the community, burning most of the mission down. They kidnapped the remaining women and children starting what became the Cayuse War. Marcus had been warned by John McLoughlin and others to be very careful tending to the sick in the Cayuse world.

AFTERMATH

Word of the Whitman Massacre spread quickly.  The Provisional Legislature of Oregon led by Governor George Abernethy called for action authorizing militia companies. They to take steps against the Cayuse and release the hostages.  Fifty men, the Oregon Rifles, were sent to The Dalles mission – Wascopam. Here, to prevent incursions to the west into the Willamette Valley.

One problem for the Provisional Government facing the Cayuse War, a lack of funds. There amounted to only a little over $40 dollars in the treasury.  To mount an expedition to bring those responsible for the killings cost money the government had a difficult time obtaining.  To help, Joseph Meek, a settler from near Oregon City and a member of the Provisional Legislature, went east arriving in Washington, DC in May 1848 seeking federal protection for the settlers.

The Rifles reached Wascopam 21 December driving off a band of Natives after losing 300 head of cattle.  At Wascopam, the men established a small stockade calling it Fort Lee after their commander Henry A. G. Lee, a former editor in Oregon City.  The men at Wascopam were soon joined by a force of over 500 militiamen led by Colonel Cornelius Gilliam.  Arriving in February, the force looked to push east toward Waiilatpu.

As the militiamen gathered, a peace commission appointed by Governor Abernathy consisting of Joel Palmer – whom Abernathy appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs – Lee and Robert Newell, Speaker of the Provisional House and a former fur trapper marched out, as well, given the charge of re-establishing peaceful relations and trying to prevent further violence. 

WAR CLOUDS GATHER

To mount an expedition to bring those responsible for the killings cost money which the government had a difficult time obtaining.  To help, Joseph Meek, a settler from near Oregon City, former mountain man and a member of the Provisional Legislature, went east arriving in Washington, DC in May 1848 seeking federal protection for the settlers.

In the interim, events of the Cayuse War took their course along the Columbia.  Peter Skene Ogden, Chief Factor with the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, was able to trade goods as a ransom for the captives’ release.  The captives reached Oregon City in early January. The stories of the killings inflaming local opinions in the Willamette Valley further.

Back along the Walla Walla River, Cayuse chiefs came together in council with Catholic priest Augustine Blanchet. They wanted to head off a region-wide war.  Native chiefs from other tribes confused by the Whitman killings “knew not which way to turn.” Some Cayuse argued for giving up those guilty, while those guilty argued for general war.

Money, supplies and discipline was always a problem among the militias.  The men had left their homes for action in the field at their own cost for the most part.  As they drew up at The Dalles, skirmishes with local Natives occurred now and then.  Militiamen soon became inclined to head home when it became thought they were only heading east to escort peace commissioners.  It took some quick speaking on the part of Colonel Gilliam to mollify the group.  Soon the regiment moved eastward.

BATTLE IS GIVEN

On 24 February 1848, the militias ran into a group of Native Americans composed from the Umatilla, Cayuse, Palouse and Walla Walla tribes.  A three-hour battle ensued in the dry plains – Battle of Sand Hollows, the biggest battle of the Cayuse War – marked by sandy depressions along the Oregon Trail just to the east of where the Boardman Bombing Range exists today.  Observing the battle were other Natives representing Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene and Flathead tribes.  Cayuse Chiefs Five Crows and Gray Eagle affirmed the white soldiers would never reach the Umatilla River because of their “medicine” powers.

The battle was inconclusive and not very bloody.  Gray Eagle was killed along with seven other Natives.  Five Crows and four others were wounded but able to escape.  The chance for a broader Native alliance occuring in the Cayuse War was stymied for the moment with the Native failure to stop the Rifles.  The militiamen suffered five wounded including Lieutenant Colonel James Waters.

WAIILATPU IS REACHED

The militia regiment crossed the Umatilla on 26 February with Cayuse encampments just beyond.  Hostility towards the Oregon Rifles among the Cayuse was not universal.  All the Natives showed concern, even those maintaining an aggressive tone, with the appearance of the settler militia amongst the Cayuse.  Several made overtures of peace.  By the first of March, the regiment marched into the Walla Walla Valley. Colonel Gilliam led two companies to visit the mission grounds.  Mutilated remains gathered up in one large grave and interred.

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

Gilliam, repulsed by the carnage at the mission, wanted to march his men into battle, but the Peace Commissioners overruled him.  The regiment fortified the area about the original mission sending out forces to try and track down the murders of the Whitman’s.

The Cayuse involved split up heading up into the nearby Blue Mountains.  Gilliam believed another regiment was needed to both track and hold forts in the lands of the Native Americans to allow movement along the emigration route.

continued problems

Supplies during the Cayuse War also were a problem. Two companies were dispatched to escort a supply train from The Dalles to Fort Waters, as the little fort at the mission at Waiilatpu was named.  Gilliam left with the men to discuss matters with Governor Abernathy. He wanted to let him know of the failure of the peace talks.

Leaving Waiilatpu on 20 March, they made camp at Well Springs beyond the Umatilla River.  Here as they settled into camp for the night, Gilliam pulled a rope from a wagon to tether his horse.  The rope caught on a gun at the bottom of the wagon which fired, killing him instantly.  His remains brought back to his widow and buried in the cemetery at Dallas.

GOLDEN INTERLUDE AND A NEW TERRITORY

By July, most of the volunteers returned to the Willamette Valley, released to tend their harvests.  A small contingent left out at Fort Waters to keep the emigrant road open.  The next chapter written in the Cayuse War fell to the federal government.  Especially as another volunteer army probably could come forward the following year with many of the men in the Territory headed off to the gold fields of California.  Even during the height of the “Cayuse War”, for example, the Provisional Legislature could not meet due to so many of its members away seeking their fortunes in the south.

The Congress finally acted on a stalled bill to create the Oregon Territory – the bill stalled over the normal problem of the time, whether to allow slavery or not.  The bill signed in August 1848 with Joseph Lane; a Mexican War general nominated as the first territorial governor.  Meek became a US Marshal for the new territory.

ENTER THE REGULAR us ARMY

A regiment had been raised in response to the increase in emigrants to Oregon in 1842-1843, the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen.  Raised in Jefferson Barracks, St Louis, Missouri, the Mexican War intervened.  The regiment went south as part of Winfield Scott’s expedition to Mexico City.  Comporting themselves well throughout the campaign with words of praise given out by General Scott, the regiment retired back to Jefferson Barracks to renew their ranks with new recruits.

Finally, on 10 May 1849, the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen with around 600 men, 31 officers, several women and children plus 160 wagons, teamsters, guides and nearly 2,000 mules and horses under the command of Brevet Colonel William W. Loring set out from Fort Leavenworth for Oregon. 

golden headaches

The timing could have been better.  Gold discoveries in California made things difficult to keep men in the ranks as it did to keep settlers at home.  Eventually the command made it to Oregon losing seventy men to death and desertion.  Forty-five wagons, and over three hundred horses and mules were lost along the way.  Another 120 deserted heading for the goldfields to the south. Many pretended to be a government expedition and gaining supplies from farmers on the way on credit.  Some 77 were regained along the way by efforts of Governor Lane and Colonel Loring.

THE CAYUSE FIVE

The regiment left the prosecution of the Whitman murderers to the locals.  But the appearance of the regiment and the constant influx of settlers convinced Cayuse leaders to end the war by giving up five tribe members, some not involved in the crimes. Escorted to Oregon City, the five gained a trial and hanged on 3 June 1850. 

The site of the trial was on Abernethy Island on the east edge of Willamette Falls.  Abernethy Island has changed dramatically in the years following, especially with the construction of Station A, the first hydroelectric power station in the Oregon.  Access to this and other sites in the area which underwent heavy industrialization for over a hundred years is now being studied by Oregon City and the Grand Ronde Tribe.

With the hanging of the Cayuse Five, the ‘war’ came to a temporary halt. It would soon heat up again, this time to the north in the new Washington Territory.

Political Meaning

The aftereffect of the Cayuse War was a new US territory.  A rapid influx of new emigrants also changed the political life of the landscape.  Like the Native Americans, the old settlers, ex-French Canadian and American trappers for the most part, quickly became outnumbered.  Political divisions before soon became forgotten as the wider American political scene of the final antebellum years came west with the new settlers.

For the native Americans, nothing good came from the Cayuse War.  The white influx did not stop leading to great unease on both sides.  Treaties came next, treaties quickly broken.  Then a war of greater involvement ensued. The Cayuse, never a tribe great in numbers, now scattered to the winds, continued to decrease in size. Absorbed into the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation along with the larger Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes. By 1900, the Cayuse number only some 400 individuals most of mixed heritage with the other tribes and Nez Perce.

REVISITING SITES AND PERSONS OF THE CAYUSE WAR

WHITMAN MISSION

Suffice it to say, a visit to the Whitman Mission National Historic Site outside of Walla Walla is a good place to gain a better understanding of the Cayuse War.  Deep in the heart of the Walla Walla Valley with wineries and grain fields abounding and windmills generating on ridges to the south, the landscape has changed but the magic remains.

The site of the mission at Waiilatpu is a National Historic Site today located eight miles to the west of Walla Walla.  History of events and activities of the Whitman mission are elaborated by exhibits within the National Park Service Visitor Center.  From there, one mile of trails spread out over the former mission site.  Rangers offer guided walks over the old grounds including the monuments erected later in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, as well as the Great Grave where victims of the Massacre lie together.

The interpreted story given at the site has changed over the years, from maybe an overemphasis on the murders to possible excuses for the events that transpired.  Murder is still murder.  The Park Service tries to straddle the fence given reasons why the Cayuse were unhappy and the obliviousness of Marcus Whitman to those reasons.

Visitor center

Start in the Visitor Center to gain an overview and go out on the trails.  You can see the excavated foundations of the mission buildings, a recreated grist mill pond – with turtles on the day we visited, as well as the Great Monument from an 1897 interpretation of the story – “the blood of these martyrs was the seed of an empire!”  The view over the valley is worth the climb, as well. 

Then, there is the Great Grave where the murdered victims or what remains could be gathered together after hungry animals scavenged over the initial burials.

It is a good starting point, but only part of the story.

WILLIAM HENRY GRAY

Next to the Great Grave is the grave of another husband and wife, William Henry Gray and Mary Augusta Dix. William came west with the Whitman’s and Spalding’s in 1836. He signed up as a missionary, but became a laborer instead, possibly because he remained unwed.

Gray moved between Fort Walla Walla and the two sites at Waiilatpu and Lapwai during the winter of 1836-1837 transporting goods needed to build the missions. During the spring of 1837, he returned east to the United States to request reinforcements for the missions in Oregon.

As well as petitioning successfully the ABCFM for more missionaries, he found a wife who also desired a role in the mission world. They came west with several other families in 1838. The trip was long and arduous. William proved not popular among the missionary families who said they would not live at the same mission where he did – two couples moved north of the Spokane River to found the Tshimakain Mission.

tensions build

The Grays lived at Lapwai with the Spalding’s, though William still worked also at Waiilatpu. He hoped to head up a mission on his own in the Spokane country, but the other missionaries did not think he was capable. Tensions built up between him and Spalding. After rebuffed by Hudson’s Bay Company twice for possible employment, William quit the mission field. Realizing a mission was not coming his way, he signed up as the Superintendent of the Oregon Institute, a Methodist school which is today, Willamette University. He also became an active member in the Provisional Government of Oregon.

He spent his later life pushing the story told by Spalding of how Whitman had saved Oregon for the United States. Spalding related Whitman’s journey back to the States as an attempt to save Oregon from the Catholics and the British. In reality, Marcus only hoped to save his own mission from closure.

furthering the message

Spreading out as a historian, in 1870, he published A History of Oregon. His book did not get good reviews either at the time of publishment nor later, being considered “a bitter, prejudiced, sectarian, controversial work in the form of a history” according to another historian, Peter H. Burnett.

Gray led a campaign to build the monument atop the hill above the old mission site. The monument went up in 1897 a couple years after Gray’s death. The remains of he and his wife came to Waiilatpu in 1916.

In addition to the Gray’s and the Great Grave, at least another twenty pioneers lie buried in the Whitman Cemetery here including the daughter of Joseph Meek, Helen – measles.

WELL SPRING AND CORNELIUS GILLIAM

Cornelius Gilliam was born 13 April 1798 in North Carolina.  The family moved when he was still young to Missouri.  Married to Mary Crawford in 1820, Gilliam became elected sheriff for Clay County in 1830.  Active in the Black Hawk War in Illinois in 1832 – Abraham Lincoln served for a short time in this adventure – and then elected as a captain for the Missouri Volunteers in the Seminole War in 1837.  Back in Missouri, he helped expel Mormons from the state becoming a colonel in the process.  The colonel got elected to the state legislature in 1843 ordained as a Free-Will Baptist preacher at the same time.

The next spring Gilliam and family – eight children – joined others to emigrate to Oregon.  Given command of a large train of over three hundred people, his temper and journey delays led to a splintering of the train into smaller companies.  He continued to lead one of those companies onward.  The Gilliam family settled on a claim at Dallas in the spring of 1845 and moved to Pedee Creek in the fall of 1847 where he became the local post agent.  In a sidenote, post agent meant little since at the time there was no one contracted to bring the mail into the territory from the rest of the country.

a new war

Governor Gorge Abernethy appointed Gilliam as colonel of the volunteer regiment to track down the murderers of the Whitman’s in late 1847.  Gilliam, as was his time earlier with the wagon train, was a somewhat controversial figure.  He brought his Cayuse War force along to accompany the Peace Commissioners to their displeasure.  They realized the chances for peace dimmed by the presence of a large fighting force.  Gilliam did not care much for the Natives, one of many settlers in favor of extermination.

REWARDS FOR DUTY

His wife Mary, had to raise the family after his death. The government never gave any redress for the loss of her husband, nor did she collect money owed her husband for his actions in the field during the Cayuse War. She was unable to even afford a second gravestone when the first misspelled his name “Gillim”. Adding insult and injury, their 640-acre land grant became reduced to 320 since Cornelius was not present to prove he had made a claim. Their farm near Pedee, sits just north of Fort Hoskins. One small posthumous honor did come his way. Gilliam County is named after the Colonel.

Besides Gilliam’s grave at the Old Dallas Cemetery – his wife’s, too – a small monument became erected in the pioneer cemetery just west of Well Springs.  Well Springs is located on the southern edge of the Boardman Bombing Range.  It was an important watering stop for overlanders between the Umatilla River at Echo and Willow Creek crossing to the west at Cecil.

TAMASTSLIKT CULTURAL CENTER

Tamástslikt is the only museum on Oregon Trail telling the story of the trail from a tribal perspective.  A $13 million-dollar 1998 project of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation – Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes – Tamástslikt endeavors to combine exhibits with research and learning for Native life both before and after interaction with non-Native cultures.  The name comes from the language of the Walla Walla meaning “interpreting our own story.”

The Umatilla and Walla Walla are not as close historically to the Cayuse as say the Nez Perce or Palouse were, but the 1855 treaties lumped the three together.  That said, history from the side of the Cayuse was rarely heard as victors get to tell the story.  Here is a good beginning to hear the events of the ‘Cayuse War’, events and causes leading up to it and the aftermath.

LAPWAI AND SPALDING

Joining Marcus and Narcissa Whitman for the long journey to Oregon in 1836, Henry and Eliza Spalding moved east to found their mission at Lapwai about seven miles east of today’s Lewistown. They lived and preached among the Nez Perce tribes.  They moved their mission after about two years two miles north to the confluence of Lapwai Creek and the Clearwater River – today the community of Spalding, site of the visitor center for the Nez Perce National Historic Park.

Henry grew up by one account an illegitimate child who still managed to graduate from the Western Reserve College in Cleveland – today’s Case Western Reserve University – marrying Eliza the same year.  He attended Lane Theological Seminary near Cincinnati but left without graduating when the couple gained an appointment from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to go west.  They headed first to the Osage tribe in Kansas but later after a delay, their mission changed to accompany the Whitman’s.

Missionary misgivings

Henry knew Narcissa from earlier days when both attended the same church in Prattsburgh, New York.  Surviving letters suggest he proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down.  Henry was also hardheaded and inflexible when it came to his interpretation of Christianity and how life should play out.  By the time the Whitman’s and Spalding’s made it to the west, relations between the two couples frayed into a discord only time ameliorated somewhat.

But, though both the Whitman’s and Spalding’s approached mission work from different directions, Henry came over the Blue Mountains to deliver the funeral sermon for little Alice Whitman who fell into the Walla Walla River at the young age of two.  The Whitman’s never had any more children while the Spalding’s had four.  To keep a sense of family, Narcissa took orphans into family care, a number which increased to eleven before her death by taking on the seven orphans of the Sager family.  Both father and mother had died from typhus on the journey over the Trail in 1844.

LAPWAI AT THE TIME OF THE KILLINGS

The Spalding’s also sent their eldest daughter, Eliza, to the Whitman’s who ran a sort of boarding school for immigrant families.  She had been born in 1837 at the first mission in Lapwai.  Growing up among the Nez Perce gave her some fluency in the local language.  Present at the time of the murders, she became a captive along with the other children and women.  She acted as interpreter during the two-month captivity.

Spalding had been en route to the Whitman’s when the murders occurred.  A local Catholic priest, John Baptiste Brouillet warned him that he too could be in danger.  He was able to return to his family at Lapwai and they traveled to the Hudson’s Bay fort on the confluence of the Walla Walla and Columbia Rivers.  Together with the freed hostages, with the onset of the Cayuse War, they made their way down the river. 

Spaldings after the cayuse War

Following the events of the Cayuse War, for a short period where they taught at the Tualatin Academy – today’s Pacific University – they resettled in 1849 in the southern Willamette Valley at Brownsville.  Henry’s wife, Eliza, died there in 1851 – she was the first burial in the Brownsville Pioneer Cemetery.  Henry went back in the mid-1850’s to visit the Nez Perce, but after trying to start his mission work in 1862 government Indian agents intervened.  He was finally able to resume his proselytizing in 1871, living at Lapwai until his death in 1874.  Eliza’s remains were reburied next to her husband over sixty years after her death.

Close to the site of the Spalding mission is where the Nez Perce National Historic Park Visitor Center is today.  A short distance away is the Spalding Cemetery where he and his wife lie buried.

Fort Walla Walla

Fort Walla Walla, also known as Fort Nez Perce, of 1847 was the Hudson’s Bay Company fort sited at the confluence of the Walla Walla and Columbia Rivers.  Three future forts were erected further east in what is today the city of Walla Walla all erected by either American militia or Federal army troops.  The fort at the Columbia began in 1818 a half mile north of the mouth of the Walla Walla – six miles south to the Snake confluence.  Originally built by the North West Company, the fort became part of the Hudson’s Bay network – renamed Fort Walla Wall – after the merger of the two companies in 1821.

The original fort burnt down in 1841 soon rebuilt of adobe.  It continued as an important trade post for the HBC until burnt again during the Yakama War in 1855.  A wayside exhibit on US 730 next to the townsite of Wallula tells the story of Fort Nez Perce-Walla Walla including stones taken from the fort’s foundation.  The original site lies underwater of Lake Wallula created by the McNary Dam.

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