Whitman Mission

The Whitman Mission is where the Oregon Trail's promise met the Cayuse's epidemic. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman came in 1836 — the Presbyterian mission to the Weyíiletpuu at Waiilatpu, seven miles from present Walla Walla, the station that became a stop on the emigrant road the Whitmans' eastern trip helped create. Marcus brought the first wagon train through; the immigrants who followed brought the measles that killed half the pášx̣apuu band, mostly children, while the doctor's medicine worked on the whites and failed on the Cayuse.

The attack on November 29, 1847 was the breaking point — Tiloukaikt and Tomahas came into the mission house asking for medicine, and the tomahawk came down while Whitman was distracted. Fourteen people died in the killing and the siege that followed, including Marcus and Narcissa; the Cayuse took captives and held them for a month. The mission's sponsors had wanted to close it; the massacre closed it permanently, and the territorial government that was organized in the aftermath — the Cayuse War, the executions, the Oregon Territory — was the one the missionaries' deaths forced into being.

The mission site is the National Historic Site — the foundations of the buildings, the mass grave on the hill, the monument to the Whitmans that the earlier generation of interpretation made the whole story. The Park Service's telling now is the complicated one — the mission as the vector of the change that destroyed the Cayuse world, the attack as the act of a people watching their children die of a disease the newcomers carried.

Whitman Mission is the archive's contact file — the place where the Oregon Trail's promise and the Cayuse's catastrophe met in one station, the massacre that created the territory, the grave on the hill where the missionaries and the mission's failure are buried together.