Walla Walla Mission Massacre

The Whitmans Were Killed Because They Brought Sickness to the Land

Apr 2, 2009

The Whitman ministered to the Cayuse tribe; and were killed by the Cayuse because the Indians believed the Whitmans were responsible for the deaths by epidemic.

Lucile Fargo, writing in Spokane Story, stated that: “Dr. Whitman may have paid the medicine’s man’s traditional penalty for failure to cure.” Indeed Dr. Whitman may have been perceived as a shaman ( a sachem or medicine man) to the natives. He was after all not only a healer of the sick but also professed to have knowledge of God or the Great Spirit. If a shaman from the Cayuse’s tribe had failed so miserably to heal the sick that were brought to him, then what use was he, and perhaps he did not have powers to communicate with the Great Spirit and bring the healing energies to the sick. He too might have suffered the same fate as Dr. Whitman. Other Cayuses may have believed that Whitman had deliberately poisoned their children as so many of them had died and all were under the care of the good doctor. They may have asked: “Why did the white children live and the brown children die?”

Death Threats and Deterioration of Relations

Beginning in 1845, Dr. Whitman began to receive death threats from some of the Cayuses as they imagined that he had spiritual powers and was not using those powers to help them in their time of despair. As more and more settles passed the mission the Cayuses began to die off. Half of the population was lost in one, two month long measles epidemic, immediately before the massacre. The missionary, Spalding, wrote home in 1848 to the parents of Narcissa Whitman describing the measles, followed by dysentery that had been raging in the country. He said that three and sometimes five Indian children died every day. The Nez Perce, Yellow Bull, declared that “the head-men met in council and made an agreement that the Doctor should be killed because 200 of the people had died after taking his medicine.”

Writings of Narcissa Whitman

There was also the attitude of Narcissa Whitman expressed in her many letters home. After the death of her beloved child, Alice, there is an urgency that can be detected within her letters as she pleads with her siblings and her parents to have them join her. She was obviously desperately lonely. She questioned her fitness to serve as a missionary and she repeated referred to the natives as “filthy”, or “lazy” or “vulgar”. She used her own standards to judge the Cayuse which always made the Cayuse deficient.

Mrs. Whitman’s depression was deepened by her loneliness and despair over the long absences of her husband and her own deteriorating health. She suffered from a kidney infection and other ailments which in turn made her attitude towards the natives worse. She felt heartsick that she could do little for the benefit of the “heathen souls” and that there was little she could do to save the “hunted, despised and unprotected Indian—from entire extinction.”

First Person Accounts of the Massacre

Three first hand accounts were written by survivors of the Whitman massacre. The seven Sager children lived with the Whitman after they became orphaned. Two of the children wrote accounts of the massacre after they became adults, Matilda Sager Delaney and Catherine Sager Pringle, but they were children at the time of the massacre, although Catherine was 14. The only adult to survive the massacre who also wrote of the account was Mary Saunders. Her account was published in 1916 and republished by Ye Gallon Press in 1977. Saunders wrote of the outbreak of measles that occurred immediately before the massacre. She declared that five of Dr. Whitman’s children (actually the Sager children and the other six orphaned children that Dr. Whitman and Narcissa had taken in) had come down with the disease as well as many of the Indian children. Saunders wrote that the Indians would take the medicine that Dr. Whitman gave them but still clung to their old remedy for all sickness, sweat baths followed by plunges in cold water which she claimed made the symptoms worse. The Indians blamed Dr, Whitman for the death of their children. Three children of Chief Toloquwet died of the measles in a matter of days. The grief and anguish must have been too great to bear and in their grief the natives needed to blame someone.

In conclusion, the primary cause of the massacre was the measles epidemic which occurred during the two months before the massacre which wiped out half of the Cayuse Tribe, as well as the Cayuse’ apprehension about the thousands of settles who passed the mission on their way to Oregon and the derogatory attitude of Mrs. Whitman towards the natives. (She was the only woman killed).

Julie Jeffrey, Converting the West, A Biography of Narcissa Whitman, (Norman, 1991)

Narcissa Whitman, The Letters of Narcissa Whitman, (Fairfield: Ye Gallon Press, 1986)

The copyright of the article Walla Walla Mission Massacre in Native American/First Nations History is owned by Dale Raugust. Permission to republish Walla Walla Mission Massacre in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.