Cassandra Tate - Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West

October 18, 1805: Cayuse and Walla Walla people meet explorers Lewis and Clark near the mouth of the Walla Walla River, in the tribes first direct encounter with Euro-Americans.

1818: Cayuse and Walla Walla leaders grant fur traders Alexander Ross and Donald McKenzie permission to build what becomes Fort Walla Walla near the site of the meeting with Lewis and Clark.

March 1, 1833: The New Yorkbased Christian Advocate and Journal publishes a report claiming that four Indians from the West had traveled to Saint Louis to seek the white mans Book of Heaven.

August 12, 1835: Rev. Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman arrive at the American Fur Companys annual rendezvous in Wyoming, intending to scout locations for missions in the West, under the sponsorship of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).

February 19, 1836: Newlyweds Marcus and Narcissa Whitman leave New York to become missionaries in Oregon Country. They are joined later by fellow missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding and William Henry Gray.

September 12, 1836: The missionary party arrives at Fort Vancouver. Narcissa and Eliza remain there for eight weeks while their husbands begin building two separate mission stations, 120 miles apart.

December 10, 1836: Marcus Whitman escorts Narcissa to a rudimentary house he has built on Cayuse land near present-day Walla Walla. Three months later, Narcissa gives birth to their only child, a daughter named Alice Clarissa.

August 1838: Four additional missionary couples arrive in Oregon Country under the sponsorship of the ABCFM. Members of the expanded missionary community quarrel almost constantly about goals, strategy, and personal habits.

June 23, 1839: The Whitmans young daughter, Alice Clarissa, drowns. Narcissa, deeply depressed, withdraws from missionary work.

September 14, 1842: Whitman receives orders from the American Board to close his mission. After riding to Boston to appear before the board in person, he successfully appeals the decision.

May through September 1843: Returning west, Whitman helps guide the first large wagon train on what becomes known as the Oregon Trail.

April 1844: Two Cayuse men who had received medical treatment from Whitman die; their relatives accuse him of causing the deaths.

April and November 1845: In a series of confrontations with Whitman, Cayuse leaders demand that he pay them for the use of their land and accuse him of being willing to use poison to kill Indians in order to seize it.

June 1846: The Senate ratifies a treaty setting the border between British Canada and the United States at the forty-ninth parallel, a move that opens Oregon Country to increasing colonization by Americans.

Fall 1847: An estimated four thousand emigrants reach Oregon Country by wagon train. Their arrival coincides with a virulent outbreak of measles among the Cayuse.

November 29, 1847: A small group of Cayuse attacks the Whitman Mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, five adult male emigrants, and two teenage boys; four more men will be killed over the next week, for a total of thirteen dead.

August 14, 1848: Congress responds to news of the so-called Whitman Massacre by establishing the Territory of Oregon as a federal entity and dispatching federal troops to fight in the Cayuse War.

April 1850: Five Cayuse men surrender to Oregon Territorial Authorities. They are charged with murder in connection with the attack on the Whitman Mission, given a brief trial, convicted, and hanged.

June 9, 1855: At the Walla Walla Treaty Council, representatives of the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla reluctantly sign a treaty ceding 6.4 million acres of their homelands in return for a 510,000-acre reservation in eastern Oregon.

December 1859: Rev. Cushing Eells establishes Whitman Seminary as a living monument to his former missionary colleague, Marcus Whitman. Initially a private school for precollege students, it becomes Whitman College in 1882.

November 28 and 29, 1897: Stephen B. Penrose, president of Whitman College, organizes a two-day commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on the Whitman Mission.

August 1936: Walla Walla business leaders raise enough money to establish the Whitman Mission National Monument (later expanded and renamed the Whitman Mission National Historic Site).

May 22, 1953: A bronze statue depicting Marcus Whitman as a muscular frontiersman is dedicated in the National Statuary Hall in the US Capitol.

August 11, 1978: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is enacted, requiring federal agencies to protect and preserve traditional spiritual and cultural practices.

November 14 and 15, 1997: Whitman College, the Whitman Mission National Historic Site, and representatives of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation mark the 150th anniversary of the attack on the Whitman Mission with a symposium titled Examining the Collision of Cultures in an Age of Multiculturalism: The Whitman Tragedy 18471997.