Blaine Harden - Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West

Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

Escape from Camp 14: One Mans Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom

King of Spies: The Dark Reign of Americas Spymaster in Korea

Following the conversational usage of the people I am writing about, this book often uses the word Indian to refer to Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest and across the United States. Elders and leaders of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation use Indian to refer to themselves, their land, their history, and their way of life. Based on my interviews with them on their reservation in northeastern Oregon, they also describe themselves as Tribal people, Native people, Indigenous people, and Native Americansor by their tribal affiliations as Cayuses, Walla Wallas, Umatillas, and Nez Perces. Still, the most common self-descriptive term is Indian, which is also used in an official tribal history of the reservation. But language is alive and changingand usage of the word Indian is generational. Among those under thirty, many prefer to use Native or Indigenous or their tribal affiliation, and some strongly reject Indian. It is a matter of personal identity, and Native identity is changing. David Treuer, an Ojibwe author writing in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, his landmark history of Native America since 1890, advises that a good rule of thumb for outsiders is to ask the Native people youre talking to what they prefer. This has been my guiding principle in determining the proper terminology for this book.

I am indebted to elders and leaders of the Umatilla Reservation for their participation in this book. It began for me as an effort to explain one of the great hoaxes in the history of the American West. It ended with a new understanding of the power of white racism to sow a century and a half of misery among the Native people of the Columbia River Plateau. I also came to revere their resilience. On the Umatilla Reservation they have engineered a great American comeback.

Introduction

THE GOOD DOCTOR

My descent into the looking-glass legend of Dr. Marcus Whitman began in elementary school when I performed in a class play about the good doctor. It was the early 1960s and I lived in the tumbleweed outback of the Pacific Northwest, where Whitman had been killed by members of the Cayuse tribe in 1847 and where he lived on as a much-in-demand martyred ghost.

Besides school plays, he had appeared in an opera, poems, hymns, childrens books, radio plays, movies, and the stained-glass windows of churches from Spokane to Seattle. His name was on high schools, middle schools, highways, hospitals, banks, churches, nursing homes, a national forest, a county in Washington State, and a glacier on Mount Rainier. Near the Walla Walla River, where his mutilated body had been buried in a mass grave, the National Park Service presided over the Whitman Mission National Historic Site. The tallest building in nearby Walla Walla was a twelve-story luxury hotel called the Marcus Whitman. It looked down upon the campus of Whitman College, an excellent liberal arts college. Boosters in Washington State raised money in 1953 to send a bronze statue of Whitmanclad in buckskin, carrying a Bible, and bearing a slogan that read My plans require time and distanceto Washington, D.C., for display in the Capitols National Statuary Hall.

This granite shaft, erected fifty years after the 1847 killing of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, stands on the grounds of the mission the Whitmans built in Cayuse country near the Walla Walla River, in what is now southeastern Washington State. Remains of the Whitmans and eleven others are buried nearby; in the southern distance are the Blue Mountains in Oregon.