Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1846-47

But in 1846, another group from the same tribes returned to California intent on seeking out the murderer themselves. Before they could find their quarry, they were caught up in the turmoil of the Bear Flag Revolt and were enlisted by Gen. John C. Fremont as scouts in the conquest of California. During their return to the Northwest in 1847, some of them died from an epidemic of measles. By the time the survivors reached home, their anger against Americans had again reached a fever point.

At Lapwai and Waiilatpu, the missions were approaching a state of collapse. In 1845, Whitman had prevented the Cayuses from trying to intercept and turn back some of the settlers, and that year and the next large number of emigrants had streamed through Cayuse country. At both missions, wandering half-bloods and Delaware Indians from the East heightened the fears of many Nez Perces and Cayuses by telling them how other tribes had lost their lands and warning them that it was only a matter of time before they would suffer the same fate. Their tales inflamed their listeners, and at Lapwai Spalding faced new crises. Opponents openly taunted and harassed him, destroyed his mill dam, broke his meeting house windows, and even assaulted him physically. Those friendly to him became defensive, and their strength and influence waned. Gradually, many of them turned away from him and returned to their shamans and old ways. Others like Timothy remained loyal to the Spaldings but tended to avoid the mission.

At Waiilatpu, Whitman was faring even worse. Few Cayuses felt anything but hatred for him. To complicate matters for him, he was now facing competition from Catholic priests, who had settled in the Willamette Valley and were planning to open a mission among the Cayuses. The threat of such competition had hung over the Spaldings and Whitmans for a number of years. A few buffalo-hunting Nez Perces had come upon priests who were living with the Flatheads in Montana, and others of them, as well as Cayuses, had met priests at Fort Walla Walla. To the distress of Spalding and Whitman, some Indians had become converted to Catholicism. . . .

The Catholic threat was almost the last straw for Whitman. He was disheartened by his lack of success, by the constant opposition of the Cayuses, and by a realization that some of them now wanted him to leave and give his place to the Catholics. Nevertheless, he stayed on, and in the fall welcomed a large, new emigration of settlers bound for the Willamette Valley. It was this group that spread the measles. The epidemic caught on quickly among the Cayuses and killed nearly half the tribe. Both Whitman and Spalding circulated among the people, administering medicine, but in the terror of the situation, a halfblood from Maine who had arrived with the emigrants, told some Cayuses that the missionaries were poisoning the Indians so that they could more quickly take their land.

The distraught Cayuses believed him, and on November 28, 1847, killed the Whitmans and 11 other whites at the mission. Three others died, unattended, of illness or while trying to escape, and 47 more, including the Spaldings’ daughter, Eliza, were taken captive. Spalding, who was returning to Waiilatpu from a Cayuse village, was warned and only barely escaped. After a harrowing trip, he got back to Lapwai to find his mission being looted by a crowd of angry young Nez Perces who had heard what had happened at Waiilatpu and sympathized with the Cayuses. He was rescued by a large number of his supporters and was taken to Craig’s house, where he found his wife and other whites from the mission sheltered under the protection of the former mountain man’s father-in-law, Thunder Eyes.

Although the Nez Perce headmen agreed not to risk a war with the Americans, they held the Spaldings and the other whites for almost a month as "hostages of peace" in Craig’s home, telling Spalding that if American soldiers came up the Columbia to fight them, they could not protect the missionaries. Spalding’s ordeal was finally ended by a party of Hudson’s Bay Company men who arrived at Fort Walla Walla on December 19 from the company’s headquarters at Fort Vancouver. [Peter Skene] Ogden immediately opened negotiations with the Cayuses and Nez Perces and managed to ransom the prisoners from both Lapwai and Waiilatpu. Escorted by 50 Nez Perces, all of whom were still friendly to the missionaries, the whites from Lapwai arrived on January 1, 1848, at Fort Walla Walla, where the Spaldings were reunited with Eliza. The next day, Ogden started down the Columbia with the rescued prisoners. Three months later the [Presbyterian missionaries] Walkers and Eellses, fearing for their won safety, finally left the Spokans. It was the end of the first Protestant missions. (pp. 73-75)