“The Americans had done them much harm. Years before, had not one of their missionaries suffered several of their people, and the son of their chiefs, to be slain in his company, yet himself escaped? Had not the son of another chief (Elijah), who had gone to California to buy cattle, been killed by Americans for no fault of his own?... So far as regarded the missionaries, Dr. Whitman and his associates, they were divided, yet so many looked on the doctor as an agent in promoting the settlement of the country with whites, it was thought best to drive him from the country, together with all the missionaries, several years before. Dr. Whitman had known that the Indians were displeased with his settlement among them. They had told him of
it; they had treated him with violence, they had attempted to outrage his wife, had burned his property, and had several times warned him to leave their country, or they should kill him.” (River of the West, p. 400.)
“The fulfilment of the laws which the agent recommended for their adoption, ... occasioned suspicions in the minds of the Indians generally that the whites designed the ultimate subjugation of their tribes. They saw in the laws they had adopted a deep-laid scheme of the whites to destroy them and take possession of their country. The arrival of a large party of emigrants about this time, and the sudden departure of Dr. Whitman to the United States, with the avowed intention of bringing back with him as many as he could enlist for Oregon, served to hasten them to the above conclusions.... The great complaint of the Indians was that the Boston people [Americans] designed to take away their lands, and reduce them to slavery.” (Rev. Gustavus Hines, D.D., assistant of Spaulding, in Pub. Doc. No. 37, on the Nez Perces in 1843, History of Oregon, p. 143.)
“They [the Indians] were demanding unreasonable pay for their lands upon which the stations were erected, and paying but little or no attention to their American teachers.” (Gray’s History of Oregon, p. 365.)
“The fact is also shown that, as far back as 1835, the Indians west of the Rocky Mountains protested against the taking away of their lands by the white races, and this was one of the alleged causes of the murder of Dr. Whitman.” (J. Ross Browne, Special Agent of the Treasury, Report to the Com. of Indian Affairs, Dec. 4, 1857.)
Thus we find that, whatever credit may be claimed for Dr. Whitman as a colonist, his course toward the people whom he was sent to evangelize was anything but just or Christian; for he not only did not pay for his own land, but helped others to steal also, and he admits himself that for some years he had utterly neglected the spiritual and mental duties of his mission. But there were other and not less potent causes at work. Of his “esteemed friend Dr. Whitman,”
Sir James Douglass, chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company, writes on December 9, ten days after the massacre:
“He hoped that time and instruction would produce a change of mind—a better state of feeling toward the mission, and he might have lived to have seen his hopes realized, had not the measles and dysentery, following in the train of immigrants from the United States, made frightful ravages this year in the upper country. Many Indians have been carried off through the violence of the disease, and others through their own imprudence. The Cayuse Indians of Wailatpu, being sufferers in this general calamity, were incensed against Dr. Whitman for not exerting his supposed supernatural power in saving their lives. They carried this absurdity beyond the point of folly. Their superstitious minds became possessed of the horrible suspicion that he was giving poison to the sick instead of wholesome medicine, with the view of working the destruction of the tribe, his former cruelty probably adding strength to their suspicions. Still, some of the reflecting had confidence in Dr. Whitman’s integrity, and it was agreed to test the effects of the medicine he had furnished on three of their people, one of whom was said to be in perfect health. They unfortunately died, and from that moment it was resolved to destroy the mission. It was immediately after burying the remains of these three persons that they repaired to the mission and murdered every man found there.”
Several other contemporary writers confirm this calm statement of events, which in themselves were enough to drive ignorant and desperate savages (for it must be borne in mind that Dr. Whitman had given up instructing them for some years to attend to his wheat and horses) to commit any act of murder or rapine. To show that the “horrible suspicion” of having been poisoned was not a mere groundless suspicion on the part of the Indians, we present the following testimony:
“I spent the winter of 1846 in Dr. Whitman’s employment. I generally worked at the saw-mill. During the time I was there, I observed that Dr. Whitman was in the habit of poisoning wolves. I did not see him put the poison in the baits for the wolves; but two of his young men of the house, by his order, were poisoning pieces of meat, and distributing them in the places where the wolves were in the habit of coming, at a short distance around the establishment of the doctor. The doctor once gave me some arsenic to poison the wolves that were around the saw-mill.... Some Indians who happened to pass there took the meat and ate it; three of them were very sick, and were near dying.... Mr. Gray, who was then [1840] living with the doctor, offered us as many melons to eat as we liked, but he warned us at the same time not to eat them indiscriminately, as some of them were poisoned. ‘The Indians,’ said he, ‘are continually stealing our melons. To stop them, we have put a little poison on the bigger ones, in order that the Indians who will eat them might be a little sick.’” (Statement of John Young, corroborated by Augustine Raymond.)