“I was there when Mr. Parker, in 1835, came to select places for Presbyterian missions among the Cayuses and Nez Perces, and to ask lands for these missions. He employed me as interpreter in his negotiations with the Indians on that occasion. Mr. Pombrun, the gentleman then in charge of the fort, accompanied him to the Cayuses and the Nez Perces. Mr. Parker, in company with Mr. Pombrun, an American, and myself, went first to the Cayuses upon the lands called Wailatpu, that belonged to the three chiefs—Splitted Lip, or Yomtipi; Red Cloak, or Waptachtakamal; and Tilankaikt. Having met them at that place, he told them that he was coming to select a place to build a preaching-house, to teach them how to live, and to teach school to their children; that he would not come himself to establish the mission, but a doctor or a medicine-man would come in his place; that the doctor would be the chief of the mission, and would come in the following spring. ‘I come to select a place for a mission,’ said he, ‘but I do not intend to take your lands for nothing. After the doctor is come,
there will come every year a big ship loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. These goods will not be sold, but given to you. The missionaries will bring you ploughs and hoes to teach you how to cultivate the land, and they will not sell, but give them to you.’
“From the Cayuses Mr. Parker went to the Nez Perces, about one hundred and twenty-five miles distant, on the lands of Old Button, on a small creek which empties into the Clearwater, seven or eight miles from the actual mission, and there he made the same promises to the Indians as at Wailatpu. ‘Next spring there will come a missionary to establish himself here and take a piece of land; but he will not take it for nothing; you shall be paid for it every year: this is the American fashion.’ In the following year, 1836, Dr. Whitman arrived among the Cayuses and began to build. The Indians did not stop him, as they expected to be paid as they said.
“In the summer of the year 1837, Splitted Lip asked him where the goods which he had promised him were; whether he would pay him, or whether he wanted to steal his lands. He told him that, if he did not want to pay him, he had better go off immediately, for he did not want to give his lands for nothing.”[135]
But the doctor and his co-laborers did not pay for the lands, nor indeed fulfil any of the promises of Mr. Parker, and thus the expected neophytes received their first lesson in duplicity, which eventually destroyed all confidence in the honesty and truthfulness of their teachers, and led directly to the massacre of Whitman and some of his companions, and to the total destruction of the Presbyterian missions. This latter event occurred late in 1847. Let us see what had been done in the eleven previous years by the agents of the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In 1842, they had but three stations. “At each of these,” says The River of the West, “there was a small body of land under cultivation, a few cattle
and hogs, a flouring and saw mill, and a blacksmith’s shop.” In 1843, Mr. Spaulding writes to Dr. White, the Sub-Indian Agent: “But two natives have as yet been admitted into the church. Some ten or twelve others give pleasing evidence of having been born again.”[136] It seems, then, that it took twelve missionaries seven years to convert two savages, at an expense of over forty thousand dollars for one year at least! Can the English Protestant mission for converting the Hebrews in Jerusalem show any return more preposterous than this?
But the years intervening between this time and their entire discontinuance show no converts at all. Business was entirely suspended, as far as spiritual affairs were concerned. Mr. Thomas McKay, an intimate friend of Whitman, under date September 11, 1848, says, “The doctor often told me that for a couple of years he had ceased to teach the Indians, because they would not listen to him”; and John Baptist Gervais about the same time assures us that “Mr. Spaulding told me himself, last fall, that for three or four years back he had ceased entirely to teach the Indians because they refused to hear him”—a fact which that unscrupulous apostle corroborated in a conversation with Dr. Ponjade, in the preceding August. “The Indians,” he said, “are getting worse every day for two or three years back; they are threatening to turn us out of the missions. A few days ago, they tore down my fences, and I do not know what the Missionary Board of New York means to do. It is a fact that we are doing no good: when the emigration passes, the Indians run off to trade, and return worse than when we came among them.”[137] Even as
early as 1839, a missionary of the Spokanes, writing to Dr. Whitman, said that the failure of that mission was so strongly impressed on his mind, he felt it necessary “to have cane in hand, and as much as one shoe on, ready for a move.” “I see,” he adds, “nothing but the power of God that can save us.” When we consider this condition of affairs in connection with the brutal massacre at Wailatpu by Dr. Whitman’s immediate neighbors and even some members of his household and congregation, at a time of profound peace, we can form some adequate idea of the benefits of the “progress and civilization of the Indians under their [Presbyterian] charge.” Will the United States Senate, in its laudable search after information, consult some of the authorities, who are with one exception Protestant, which we have quoted?
The Catholic missions may be said to have commenced in 1838. In that year, two Catholic priests passed Walla Walla on their way from Canada to Fort Vancouver. In 1839 and 1840, one of them, Father Demers, occasionally visited Walla Walla, for a short time, to give instruction to the Indians, many of whom were in the habit of visiting him, particularly the Cayuses and Nez Perces at the fort. This presence excited the wrath of Dr. Whitman, and he presumed so far as to reprimand in severe language the gentleman in charge of the post. “From the time the Jesuits arrived,” says Gray, “his own [H. H. Spaulding’s] pet Indians had turned Catholics, and commenced a quarrel with him. These facts seemed to annoy him, and led him to adopt a course opposed by Smith, Gray, and Rodgers.” The visits of the Catholic missionaries were, however, few and far between, till the 5th of September, 1847,
when the Rt. Rev. Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet arrived at Fort Walla Walla, accompanied by the Superior of the Oblates and two other clergymen, to establish permanent missions in Eastern Oregon. It was the design of the bishop to locate a mission on the lands of Towatowe (Young Chief), a Catholic Indian, who had offered him his own house for that purpose. The Young Chief, however, being absent hunting, Dr. Blanchet was delayed at the fort, longer than he anticipated, and while there was visited by Protestant missionaries and Indian chiefs alike. The former treated him with great incivility and disrespect. Dr. Whitman, we are told by an eye-witness, “made a furious charge against the Catholics, accusing them of having persecuted Protestants, and even of having shed their blood wherever they had prevailed. He said he did not like Catholics; ... that he should oppose the missionaries to the extent of his power.... He spoke against the Catholic Ladder (a picture explaining the principal points of Catholic faith), and said that he would cover it with blood to show the persecution of Protestants by Catholics. He refused to sell provisions to the bishop, and protested that he would not assist the missionaries unless he saw them in starvation.”[138] The temper of the savages was milder than their would-be evangelizers. On the 26th of October, Young Chief came to the fort, and asked for a priest to be sent to teach his young people. He repeated the offer of his house, but suggested as a substitute the lands of his relative Tilokaikt, upon which Dr. Whitman was settled. On November 4, the four chiefs of the Cayuses assembled at Walla Walla, and after a long “talk” agreed to let the bishop