Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

Parker’s optimistic note about the Nez Perce homeland cheered the missionaries, and they traveled on to Fort Walla Walla with a Hudson’s Bay Company brigade that had come to the rendezvous and a large party of enthusiastic and helpful Nez Perces. Among the most eager to befriend the white men and women were the band’s chief, Tackensuatis, whom Spalding later renamed Samuel, and a lesser headman named Aleiya, which the American mountain men, partly in recognition of his ability in argument, had corrupted into The Lawyer. About 40 years old and from the Kamiah region, Lawyer was the son of the Twisted Hair, who had met Lewis and Clark. . . . On the plains, he had learned some English and, ambitious for prestige, had often interposed himself as interpreter and negotiator between the American fur men and the Nez Perces. Both he and Tackensuatis had been gravely wounded at the battle of Pierre’s Hole during the rendezvous of 1832, . . . and the rest of his life Lawyer limped from his wound. . . . He knew of the Nez Perce delegation to St. Louis and had looked forward to learning more from white teachers and their "book."

After reaching the Columbia River, the missionary families, thoroughly uncomfortable with each other, decided to establish separate missions. The Whitmans settled among the Cayuse Indians at Waiilatpu, "place of the rye grass." On the Walla Walla River in present-day southeastern Washington. The Spaldings, guided by Tackensuatis, selected a site among the Nez Perces about three kilometers (two miles) above the mouth of Lapwai Creek. Near the village of a headman and shaman named Hin-mah-tute-ke-kaikt (Thunder Eyes), Tackensuatis and other Nez Perces helped Gray and the Spaldings build a log house 13 by 5.4 meters (42 by 18 feet), divided by a partition into a living quarters and a classroom for the Indians. On December 23, 1836, the Spaldings moved into the building.

In the beginning, the missionary couple had good relations with most of the Nez Perces. Counseled by their headmen, the people willingly supplied food and labor to the Spaldings. They were excited by the novelty of having white teachers living among them and, fearful that they might find cause for leaving, did everything they could to help make them comfortable. They also were interested in the house and the material possessions and in everything the Spaldings taught them. They came in large numbers to Henry Spalding’s morning and evening prayers and Sunday services. Aided by the translations of John, one of the Nez Perce boys whom Whitman had taken east and whom Spalding used as an interpreter, they learned to sing hymns and gospel tunes and followed intently Spalding’s sermons and narrations of bible stories, which he made more graphic to them by holding up pictures he had painted. Many Nez Perces became especially attached to Mrs. Spalding, a frail woman whose gentle nature contrasted with her husband’s stern gruffness. She printed her own alphabet books to try to help the Nez Perces learn reading and writing, and she began a day school at the mission, attended principally by women, children, and a few of the important older men who hoped that what they learned would augment their status. Soon afterward, she also organized a class of Indian girls, instructing them in sewing and in the chores of running a white man’s house.

Spalding, meanwhile, ingratiated himself to scores of Nez Perces who came to him every day for medical treatment for all sorts of ailments. Though he was unskilled as a physician, he drew on his stores of calomel and other medicines and taught bloodletting to his patients. Often, he sent Indians with medicines and instructions to patients in other villages or traveled to them himself. At the same time, anxious to end the Nez Perces’ annual migrations to the plains for buffalo and keep them settled around them the full year for his religious instruction, Spalding distributed seeds and some 30 hoes and began to teach them to plant gardens and orchards. By May 1, 1836, the Nez Perces had some 6 hectares (15 acres) of peas, potatoes, and garden vegetables under cultivation and had helped Spalding set out a nursery of apple trees.

Despite the good start, trouble gradually developed. Spalding had difficulty learning the Nez Perces’ language, and his temper ran short when individuals did not understand him or failed to follow his instructions. Believing himself a savior to people who had no religion and were misled by their shamans, whom he viewed as sorcerers, he had little tolerance for the Nez Perces’ cultural beliefs and habits and often erupted into bursts of anger at them. Some Nez Perces resented his hostility to some of their customs, including polygamy, sexual relationships between persons other than spouses of nuclear families, gambling, belief in guardian spirits, and singing, and other practices. And many took offense at the new ways of life that he tried to get them to adopt. Headmen and other males objected to doing manual labor and gardening, which they regarded as women’s work. Others viewed agriculture as abhorrent and a desecration of their mother, the Earth. They ignored Spalding’s efforts to get them to settle around the mission and resisted his insistence on attendance at prayer meetings and services. Still others found his teachings on Christian conduct and marriages and such concepts as their burden of original sin either incomprehensible or repugnant. Some headmen and shamans were angered by the missionaries’ attempts to discredit them and wean their followers from them. And several, including Tackensuatis, perceiving that their expectations of material success and increased prestige were not being realized and that the Spaldings, unlike the American fur men on the plains, did not pay for the goods and services which the Nez Perces gave them, turned away from the missionaries.

The hot-tempered Spalding retaliated with punishments, withholding goods and favors, frightening individuals by consigning them to hell and eternal damnation, and threatening to whip them. When, by their silence, some headmen seemed to side with him against offenders, he carried out the threat, sometimes doing the whipping himself and sometimes persuading leading men to do so. Although such punishments contributed to a general waning of the Nez Perces’ initial enthusiasm for white teachers, the Nez Perces’ initial enthusiasm for white teachers, the original motives for wanting them and the fear of losing them continued to be so strong that many headmen and their people remained protectively loyal to the Spaldings. . . .

In November 1837, Nez Perce women at the mission showed their affection for Mrs. Spalding when she gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Eliza. They helped Mrs. Spalding and treated both mother and daughter with a care a warmth that touched the missionaries. The next year, Spalding strained the relationship by using threats and the whip to force Nez Perce males to help him relocate the mission to the mouth of Lapwai Creek on the site of present-day Spalding and the Nez Perce National Historical Park headquarters, an area he thought to be cooler and less bothered by mosquitoes. Though the Nez Perces objected to the forced labor and again smarted with resentments, they finally helped him build a new, two-story home and eventually a schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, and two small dwellings for assistants and Nez Perce schoolchildren. . . .

Spalding . . . made his first converts, baptizing two leading headmen who frequented the Lapwai mission though they came from other regions. One was Tamootsin, a mild, sensitive man from Alpowa—the Sabbath observed—on the Snake River below the confluence with the Clearwater. Spalding called him Timothy. A devout Christian, he would also be a loyal, lifelong friend of the whites. The other was Tuekakas, who was the leader of the Nez Perce band in the present-day Wallowa Valley of northeastern Oregon and whom Spalding named Joseph. In the summer of 1839, Spalding accompanied Joseph on a visit to his Oregon homeland and became convinced of his genuine interest in Christianity. Spalding also baptized the children of Timothy and Joseph, including one of Joseph’s sons who was born early in 1840 and whom the missionary named Ephraim. This was probably the future Chief Joseph.

Spalding’s problems, however, had not eased. Mountain men, who had abandoned trapping and come to the Oregon Territory to seek permanent homes, appeared at the mission and vexed Spalding by taking the Indians’ side in their quarrels with him. One of them, William Craig, who had married a daughter of Thunder Eyes, the Lapwai Creek shaman and headman whom Spalding called James, criticized Spalding’s dictation to the Nez Perces and several times aroused his father-in-law against the missionary. At the same time, serious friction developed among the missionaries themselves, ant they directed a stream of complaining letters about each other to the Mission Board in Boston. Dismayed, the Board in 1842 ordered the closing of both the Lapwai and Waiilatpu missions. . . . (pp. 63-71).