Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1879

. . . The national policy toward Indians had now been established as one of assimilating the Indians into white society as quickly as possible. To achieve that goal, agents and missionaries, often aided by the presence of troops, were receiving the support of the Department of the Interior on reservations to stamp out native beliefs and practices, undermine and destroy traditional forms of leadership and government, and hasten the adoption of the white man’s culture and civilization.

During and after the war, this drive toward acculturation made great headway among the treaty Nez Perces. The most influential missionaries on the Nez Perce reservation were two spinster sisters, Sue and Kate McBeth. The former had been sent to Lapwai by the Presbyterians as a government-paid teacher in October 1873. Scottish-born, about 40 years old, partly crippled and in feeble health, she possessed the spirit of a crusader bent on eliminating every trace of "heathenish" influence among the Nez Perces. When Spalding died in 1874, she moved from Lapwai to Kamiah, taking up his work of educating young men to become Presbyterian leaders for the tribe. During the excitement at the beginning of the war, she fled to Portland, but in the fall of 1877 returned to Lapwai. Because of complaints that she had done church work on government time, she lost her job as schoolteacher, but she continued as a missionary and in 1879, joined by her newly arrived sister, Kate, went back to Kamiah. With great zeal, and little tolerance for traditional Indian customs, the two strong-willed sisters became a driving force for Presbyterianism and acculturation on the reservation, basing their work at two mission schools at Kamiah. One of them was conducted by Sue for men and the other by Kate for women.

The Presbyterians’ methods differed from those of the Catholics. At St. Joseph’s Mission on the reservation, the priests were generally more tolerant of Indian ways and customs and worked with the traditional headmen, who organized a council and elected a native chief of all Nez Perce Catholics. Though they had no religious authority, the headmen retained their positions of prestige through their membership on the council, which was responsible for carrying out disciplinary and other tasks and such honors as leading the people in holy day observances. In contrast, the Presbyterians, and the McBeths in particular, not only sharpened the cleavage between Christian and non-Christian Nez Perces but created a factionalism among Presbyterian Indians by giving church status and prominence to anyone they favored, even if they came from families that had never possessed leadership positions in the tribe. Since power became increasingly centered about the church, those who were ordained as native ministers or elders, or received other leading positions in church societies, inevitably weakened the prestige of families of old-time leaders who were not similarly favored. Some chiefs, sub-chiefs, and shamans, finding their influence waning, intrigued against the native ministers and church officers, while the latter, sometimes with the McBeths’ support, fought back by searching for and exposing every sign of "heathenism," real or fancied. In the process, the factionalism tended to accelerate acculturation with each side trying to become more white and Christian than the other. (pp. 157-160)