“It has been said by some of my friends in this country that they felt greatly mortified to see me in the dust at the bishop’s feet begging for my life.... This is not the first time that Protestants (that is, heretics) have lain prostrate at the feet of the Pope of Rome. I saw my life, under God, in the hands of the bishop and the priests. I had a right to ask it again. I seemed to see the hands of these priests wet with the blood of our associates.... I stopped not to ask whose hands placed the bishop’s foot upon my neck, the lives of so many human beings were worth the struggle.”
Can the force of prejudice and deception go further than this? Here is a man, who, if not an open enemy
of the missionaries, was certainly a violent opponent, whose life was saved by one of them at a most critical moment at imminent danger to his own, who was shown the pathway by which he might escape the fury of the savages whose hatred he had awakened by long years of injustice, and who was even supplied with food from the poor priest’s scrip, turning round on his benefactors when he attained a place of safety, and vilifying the church and religion to whose lesson of charity he owed his miserable existence. This is the man, too, upon whose authority the “Christian Associations of Oregon” have undertaken to brand the heroic priests of that section as instigators of murder; and who has undertaken to inform the Senate, and provide Mr. Delano with matters for history “in a more permanent form.”
And here it may be well to dispose of some of the minor charges. Pub. Doc. No. 37, at page 30, says of the scenes of the Whitman massacre:
“They [the Indian children] leaped and screamed for joy, throwing handfuls of blood around, drinking down the dying agonies of their victims as a precious draught. These blood-stained little savages were to receive the sacred ordinance of baptism a few hours after, at the hands of the priest of God—the mangled bodies yet lying unburied around, the food of dogs and wolves by night, and of hogs and vultures by day, seeming to pay down to the Indians for what they had done.”
We are not aware that in the whole course of Protestant history there is to be found a more deliberate, cool, and atrocious tissue of falsehoods than the above. Two days, not a few hours, after the murder, three sick children were baptized, of whom two were so ill that they died the same day. Are those some of the children who leaped and screamed for joy?
The baptism took place two miles from Whitman’s Station, so that the bodies of the slain could not well have been lying around. The dogs and wolves, hogs and vultures, are purely the creation of the Rev. H. H. Spaulding’s imagination, and would, in vulgar parlance, be styled “piling on the agony.” Before the arrival of Father Brouillet, Joseph Stainfield had already washed the corpses, and, with the assistance of the good priest, they were buried. The insinuation in the last line is worthy of Spaulding, and shows to what extremes a man will go whose sense of truth and even decency has become completely blunted.
Another charge against the missionaries is that they acted inhumanly with the captives, and that Father Brouillet, who promised to return to them, neglected to do so. It is true he did not do so, and the prisoners may thank Mr. Spaulding for his not returning. Had he not been as solicitous about saving that individual’s life, and thereby enable him to go down to the grave at an old age with a load of falsehood and forgeries on his soul, he would never have incurred the ill-feeling of the Indians of Wailatpu, or be himself kept a prisoner in Young Chief’s tent for two or three weeks. But his thoughts and those of his fellow-missionaries were with the unfortunates, and his every effort was used, and successfully too, for their liberation. While Spaulding, from his mission with the Nez Perces, was writing lying letters to his “reverend and dear friend,” Bishop Blanchet, soliciting his good offices with the Indians with regard to the captives, amongst whom was his own daughter, that ecclesiastic was calling around him the chiefs of the Cayuses, admonishing them to treat their captives kindly, promising to write to the American governor for terms of peace, and attending a council at
Fort Walla Walla, at which the Indians consented and actually did liberate the prisoners, the ransom being paid by the agents of the much abused Hudson Bay Company. Spaulding himself was then virtually a prisoner among the Nez Perces, with whom he lived eleven years, and “was very much beloved,” if we may believe his own statement.
We now come to what we may be permitted to call the first grand falsehood, as set forth in Pub. Doc. No. 37, for the information of the Senate and the benefit of history, namely, that the Whitman murderers were instigated by the “Jesuits.” This calumny is repeated in several places and in many forms in this extraordinary public document, and may be supposed to be crystallized in the two following paragraphs: