Narcissa Prentiss Whitman (1808 - 1847) and Henry Whitman (1802 - 1847)
As we’ve seen in the account above, husband and wife joined up with Henry and Eliza Spalding to attempt to convert the Nez Perce Indians of the Pacific Northwest, but at one point in the mission their paths diverged from those of the Spaldings, as they headed for Washington with their friends going towards Idaho. This was the beginning of the end for the young couple, but where did it all begin? Like Spalding, Narcissa Prentiss was born in New York and at the age of twenty-eight decided she wanted to be a missionary. She was married the next year (1836) to Marcus Whitman, taking his name and also keeping her own, which I think may have been somewhat atypical for the time and may have shown her to be rather independent, though I doubt she was any sort of feminist. Marcus had wanted to be a minister but was unable to afford the school fees. He trained as a doctor but felt the pull of the west, as did his new wife. Marcus had already answered this call in 1835, travelling with fellow missionary Samuel Parker to northern Idaho and northwestern Montana where he ministered to the Nez Perce Indians.
The done thing seems to have been to have got married and then almost spent your honeymoon telling natives how great your god was, and why they should worship him. Worked for them anyway, and also the Spaldings, who set off on the same journey after having been only recently married too. The Whitmans, having crossed the Rockies with the Spaldings and thereby Narcissa and Eliza becoming the first two women to do so, they set up their mission in the hilariously-named Walla Walla, in Washington. Narcissa at least saw her role as not just converting the heathen, but teaching them white American values, such as chores, making candles and soap, and baking.
The typical white sense of superiority towards what were considered savage and uncivilised peoples shows in Narcissa’s letters, where she declares the natives, the Cayuse, are "so filthy they make a great deal of cleaning wherever they go ... " and goes on to lament "we have come to elevate them and not to suffer ourselves to sink down to their standard." Thanks lady: I don’t think they asked you to step in with your bloody wooden cross and your posturing and pontificating. ****ing Christians. The Whitmans further instructed the Cayuse to build a place of worship for themselves, and when the Indians wondered what was wrong with the one they had already, Narcissa muttered icily in her letters 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." Charming. Segregation already in their minds: one church for us, one for those “dirty” natives. That’s how to convert them to the love of God, all right.
Samuel Parker had made promises to the Cayuse that they would be compensated for the land on which the white men built. When this payment was not forthcoming, their chief, Umtippe, made dire warnings, especially when his wife fell ill. He told Whitman "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." Further tensions arose when the Catholic Church sent its representatives, including Bishop François Norbert Blanchet to compete with the Protestants for the souls of the Cayuse, and the natives, not surprisingly, played each against the other. Henry Spalding would later, as already related, blame the Catholics for the coming massacre, as well as the closure of all missions in the Pacific Northwest. No evidence exists to support or refute this, but historically the two denominations have always hated and tried to thwart each other, so I’d say it’s perhaps not outside the realm of possibility.
Tragedy struck in 1839 when Narcissa’s only child, her daughter Alice Clarissa, was drowned when she fell into a pool, but this did not stop her striking out on her own to visit other towns and settlements when her husband headed back home to gain reinforcements, but unbeknownst to him, the mission itself was on borrowed time, as were they. Like the Spaldings, Whitman believed that the alteration of the natives’ nomadic habits, and settling them in villages while teaching them European-based agriculture would make them easier to convert, or perhaps to put it more bluntly, a stationery target is easier to hit.
The Cayuse shrugged and said they didn’t see what the problem was, so to speak. They had been a nomadic people for thousands of years, and weren’t about to change now. Incensed at their stubbornness and reluctance to change, that is, to remodel their lives to shape his vision and for his convenience, Whitman raged again against the Papists: “The novelty of working for themselves and supplying their own wants seem to have passed away; while the papal teachers and other opposers of the mission appear to have succeeded in making them believe that the missionaries ought to furnish them with food and clothing and supply all their wants.” Complaints and accusations that were echoed in part across the water in England, and which led to the setting up of workhouses.
Rather oddly, it seems to me, in order to safeguard melon patches from which the Cayuse had been, cartoon-animal-like, stealing the fruits, William Gray, another pioneer who would go on to eventually more or less set up the provisional government of Oregon, had poisoned them. Just a little, not to kill but just to deter the Cayuse from taking the melons. Now, if you’re already having problems with natives and are trying to gain their trust, I don’t think poisoning their food, even a little bit, is the smartest move, especially when they’ve already accused you of bringing bad juju in the form of diseases into their community.
In 1847 an epidemic of measles swept through Washington, and the natives, having no natural immunity to the disease, died while the whites mostly survived. While Whitman and the other missionaries did what they could for them, things went from bad to worse when a half-breed Iroquois called Joe Lewis, who had recently joined the mission, spread it about that the white men were poisoning, not treating the patients. Given that they had suffered poisoning before - and deliberate poisoning too - this then was not hard for the natives to believe.
They did, and all hell was set free.
Marcus was the first to go, taking an axe in the head when he was asked for medicine and taken by surprise, then shot in the neck. As the camp erupted in violence, Cayuse swarmed all over the mission and death was everywhere. Narcissa died soon after her husband, and so ended the mission of the Whitmans to civilise the Cayuse. Soon afterwards their mission was abandoned, and shortly after that the ABCFM declared there would be no more missions authorised into the Pacific Northwest. Neither Narcissa nor Marcus would live to see the results of their interference in a culture, as the Cayuse War exploded across the area, resulting in the decimation of the tribe and leading, along with other Indian wars, to the forced resettlement of the tribes on reservations while white people took their land. I’m sure God would have been proud.
America certainly was (which might be the same thing to some people). Not only was Whitman (Marcus, that is) commemorated in the name of schools and colleges, a forest and a glacier, he has (or had, until it was removed recently in the wake of BLM protests) a statue in the Capitol and even has a day dedicated to him, September 4 being Marcus Whitman day. There is also a hotel and conference centre with his name.
Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814 - 1888)
At the extreme other end of the country, we have this guy. French born, he arrived in America in 1839, about the same time as the Whitmans and the Spaldings, but went to the mission in Cincinnati, and worked in Ohio and Kentucky until 1850, when he was appointed by the Pope as Bishop in New Mexico. This seems to have come as a surprise to him, and I can’t say why he was chosen, whether it was due to reports of his good works or whether in fact it was a poison chalice doing the rounds at the Vatican that Pius XII had to unload on someone. Either way, he arrived way down south in Sante Fe in the summer of 1851, but though the governor welcomed him, the Spanish priests already there did not. They refused to recognise his authority, and he had to go personally to their bishop to confirm the diocese was now under his control. The Spanish priests probably said something similar to “We don’ need no steenking Frenchman telling us what to do,” but had to accept his authority, as their bishop had said “sorry hombres, is how it is,” or something.
With his authority no longer in doubt - the Pope trumps any bishop you may care to name - Lamy set about reforming the New Mexico Church, building schools and making new parishes, and of course building churches. He made himself unpopular by ending the custom of concubinage, by which the local priests, forbidden to marry, could still get their end away with the local talent, and also broke up many brotherhoods, secret and exclusive religious societies. Let’s just say he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular from the off. Nevertheless he was successful in moulding the Catholic faith in New Mexico, and he had the St. Francis Cathedral built, but he died in 1888 from pneumonia at the age of seventy-four.
Thomas Starr King (1824 - 1864)
Here’s one we haven’t come across before. Unitarians apparently believe that God is one being, not a trinity (sounds somewhat more logical than Christianity) and so while they are prepared to believe Jesus was a prophet, an emissary of God, they do not accept that he was God too. Which again I have to say makes far more logical sense, but probably made it hard for King to convince those who were not of his faith to switch. Oh, look! Unitarians also reject the idea of Original Sin and the infallibility of the Bible. I like these guys more and more. Another native of New York, King doesn’t appear to have attended any seminaries or schools, leaving his education in fact at the age of fifteen to support his family, and taught himself to be a minister.
He made his name in Boston, in the church on Hollis Street, of which he was made pastor in 1849, and also on the
lyceum circuit, his speeches making him one of the most famous preachers in New England. An abolitionist and an environmentalist, he moved to San Francisco in 1850 and gave sermons on the beauty of Yosemite, for which he would lobby and eventually achieve the status of a national park. During the Civil War he was credited by Lincoln as “the man who saved the Union”, by speaking fervently and at length as to why California should not secede.
"I pitched into Secession, Concession and (John C.) Calhoun (former U.S. vice president), right and left, and made the Southerners applaud. I pledged California to a Northern Republic and to a flag that should have no treacherous threads of cotton in its warp, and the audience came down in thunder. At the close it was announced that I would repeat it the next night, and they gave me three rounds of cheers." ... King covered his pulpit with an American flag and ended all his sermons with "God bless the president of the United States and all who serve with him the cause of a common country."
He set up the Pacific branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, which raised money for wounded soldiers, but the constant grind of the lecture circuit took a toll on his health and he died of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1864. Like other missionaries, he is commemorated in schools, parks, mountains, streets, even a giant Redwood, and he has his own statue in the Capitol, though it was replaced by Republicans in 2006 with one of Reagan. Right. Reagan. Okay.