Chapter 6: The Preacher Who Rode for an Empire

THIS is the forgotten story of the greatest ride. The history of the nation has been punctuated with other great rides, it is true. Paul Revere rode thirty miles to rouse the Middlesex minutemen and save from capture the guns and powder stored at Concord; Sheridan rode the twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek and by his thunderous “Turn, boys, turn—we’re going back!” saved the battle—and the names of them both are immortalized in verse that is more enduring than iron. Whitman, the missionary, rode four thousand miles and saved us an empire, and his name is not known at all.

Though there were other actors in the great drama which culminated in the grim old preacher’s memorable ride—suave, frock-coated diplomats and furtive secret agents and sun-bronzed, leather-shirted frontiersmen and bearded factors of the fur trade—the story rightfully begins and ends with Indians. There were four of them, all chieftains, and the beaded patterns on their garments of fringed buckskin and the fashion in which they wore the feathers in their hair told the plainsmen as plainly as though they had been labelled that they were listened to with respect in the councils of the Flathead tribe, whose tepees were pitched in the far nor’west. They rode their lean and wiry ponies up the dusty, unpaved thoroughfare in St. Louis known as Broadway one afternoon in the late autumn of 1832. Though the St. Louis of three quarters of a century ago was but an outpost on civilization’s firing-line and its six thousand inhabitants were accustomed to seeing the strange, wild figures of the plains, the sudden appearance of these Indian braves, who came riding out of nowhere, clad in all the barbaric panoply of their rank, caused a distinct flutter of curiosity.

The news of their arrival being reported to General Clarke, the military commandant, he promptly assumed the ciceronage of the bewildered but impassive red men. Having, as it chanced, been an Indian commissioner in his earlier years, he knew the tribe well and could speak with them in their own guttural tongue. Beyond vouchsafing the information that they came from the upper reaches of the Columbia, from the country known as Oregon, and that they had spent the entire summer and fall upon their journey, the Indians, with characteristic reticence, gave no explanation of the purpose of their visit. After some days had passed, however, they confided to General Clarke that rumors had filtered through to their tribe of the white man’s “Book of Life,” and that they had been sent to seek it. To a seasoned old frontiersman like the general, this was a novel proposition to come from a tribe of remote and untamed Indians. He treated the tribal commissioners, nevertheless, with the utmost hospitality, taking them to dances and such other entertainments as the limited resources of the St. Louis of those days permitted, and, being himself a devout Catholic, to his own church. Thus passed the winter, during which two of the chiefs died, as a result, no doubt, of the indoor life and the unaccustomed richness of the food. When the tawny prairies became polka-dotted with bunch-grass in the spring, the two survivors made preparations for their departure, but, before they left, General Clarke, who had taken a great liking to these dignified and intelligent red men, insisted on giving them a farewell banquet. After the dinner the elder of the chiefs was called upon for a speech. You must picture him as standing with folded arms, tall, straight and of commanding presence, at the head of the long table, a most dramatic and impressive figure in his garments of quill-embroidered buckskin, with an eagle feather slanting in his hair. He spoke with the guttural but sonorous eloquence of his people, and after each period General Clarke translated what he had said to the attentive audience of army officers, government officials, priests, merchants, and traders who lined the table.

“I have come to you, my brothers,” he began, “over the trail of many moons from out of the setting sun. You were the friends of my fathers, who have all gone the long way. I have come with an eye partly open for my people, who sit in darkness. I go back with both eyes closed. How can I go back blind, to my blind people? I made my way to you with strong arms through many enemies and strange lands that I might carry much back to them. I go back with both arms broken and empty. Two fathers came with us; they were the braves of many winters and wars. We leave them asleep here by your great water and wigwams. They were tired in many moons, and their moccasins wore out.

“My people sent me to get the white man’s Book of Life. You took me to where you allow your women to dance as we do not ours, and the Book was not there. You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit with candles, and the Book was not there. You showed me images of the good spirits and pictures of the good land beyond, but the Book was not among them to tell us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail to my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy with gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them; yet the Book is not among them. When I tell my poor, blind people, after one more snow, in the big council that I did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go on a long path to other hunting-grounds. No white man will go with them and no white man’s Book to make the way plain. I have no more words.”

Just as the rude eloquence of the appeal touched the hearts of the frontier dwellers who sat about the table in St. Louis, so, when it was translated and published in the Eastern papers, it touched the hearts and fired the imaginations of the nation. In a ringing editorial The Christian Advocate asked: “Who will respond to go beyond the Rocky Mountains and carry the Book of Heaven?” And this was the cue for the missionary whose name was Marcus Whitman to set foot upon the boards of history.

His preparation for a frontiersman’s life began early for young Whitman. Born in Connecticut when the eighteenth century had all but run its course, he was still in his swaddling-clothes when his parents, falling victims to the prevalent fever for “going west,” piled their lares and penates into an ox-cart and trekked overland to the fertile lake region of central New York, Mrs. Whitman making the four-hundred-mile journey on foot, with her year-old babe in her arms. Building a cabin with the tree trunks cleared from the site, they began the usual pioneer’s struggle for existence. His father dying before he had reached his teens, young Marcus was sent to live with his grandfather in Plainfield, Mass., where he remained ten years, learning his “three R’s” in such schools as the place afforded, his education later being taken in hand by the local parson. His youth was passed in the usual life of the country boy; to drive home the cows and milk them, to chop the wood and carry the water and do the other household chores, and, later on, to plough and plant the fields—a training which was to prove invaluable to him in after years, on the shores of another ocean. I expect that the strong, sturdy boy of ceaseless activity and indomitable will—the Plainfield folk called him mischievous and stubborn—who was fonder of hunting and fishing than of algebra and Greek, must have caused his old grandfather a good deal of worry; though, from all I can learn, he seems to have been a straightforward and likable youngster. Very early he set his heart on entering the ministry; but, owing to the dissuasions of his relatives and friends, who knew how pitifully meagre was a clergyman’s living in those days, he reluctantly abandoned the idea and took up instead the study of medicine. After practising in Canada for several years, he returned to central New York, where, with but little help, he chopped a farm out of the wilderness, cleared it, and cultivated it, built a grist-mill and a sawmill, and at the same time acted as physician for a district fifty miles in radius. He was in the heyday of life, prosperous, and engaged to the prettiest girl in all the countryside, when, reading in the local paper the appeal made by the Indian chieftains in far-away St. Louis, the old crusading fervor that had first turned his thoughts toward the ministry, flamed up clear and strong within him, and, putting comfort, prosperity, everything behind him, he applied to the American Board for appointment as a missionary to Oregon. Such a request from a man so peculiarly qualified for a wilderness career as Whitman could not well be disregarded, and in due time he received an appointment to go to the banks of the Columbia, investigate, return, and report. The wish of his life had been granted: he had become a skirmisher in the army of the church.

Accompanied by a fellow missionary, Whitman penetrated into the Western wilderness as far as the Wind River Mountains, near the present Yellowstone Park. After familiarizing themselves through talks with traders, trappers, and Indians with the conditions which prevailed in the valley of the Columbia, Whitman and his companion returned to Boston, and upon the strength of their report the American Board decided to lose no time in occupying the field. Ordered to establish a station on the Columbia, in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla, then a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Whitman turned the long and arduous trip across the continent into a wedding journey. The conveyances used and the roundabout route taken by the bridal couple strikingly emphasize the primitive internal communications of the period. They drove in a sleigh from Elmira, N. Y., to Hollidaysburg, a hamlet on the Pennsylvania Canal, at the foot of the Alleghanies, the canal-boats, which were built in sections, being taken over the mountains on a railway. Travelling by the canal and its communicating waterways to the Ohio, they journeyed by steamboat down the Ohio to its junction with the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence up the Missouri to Council Bluffs, where they bought a wagon (bear that wagon in mind, if you please, for you shall hear of it later on), and outfitted for the journey across the plains. Accompanied by another missionary couple, Doctor and Mrs. Spalding, they turned the noses of their mules northwestward and a week or so later caught up with an expedition sent out by the American Fur Company to its settlement of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia. Following the North Fork of the Platte, they crossed the Wind River Mountains within sight of the landmark which came in time to be known as Frémont’s Peak, though these two young women crossed the Great Divide six years before Frémont, “the pathfinder,” ever set eyes upon it. Few women of our race have ever made so perilous or difficult a journey. Before it was half completed, the party, owing to a miscalculation, ran out of flour and for weeks on end were forced to live on jerked buffalo meat and tea. Crossing the Snake River at a point where it was upward of a mile in width, the wagon was capsized by the velocity of the current, and, the mules, on which the women had been put for safety, becoming entangled in the harness, their riders escaped drowning by what the missionaries devoutly ascribed to a miracle and the rough-spoken frontiersmen to “damned good luck.” Another river they crossed by means of a dried elkskin with two ropes attached, on which they lay flat and perfectly motionless while two Indian women, holding the ropes in their teeth, swam the stream, drawing this unstable ferry behind them.

At Fort Hall, near the present site of Pocatello, Ida., they came upon the southernmost of that chain of trading-posts with which the Hudson’s Bay Company sought to guard the enormous territory which, without so much as a “by-your-leave,” it had taken for its own. Here Captain Grant, the company’s factor, made a determined effort to induce Whitman to abandon the wagon that he had brought with him across the continent in the face of almost insuperable obstacles. But the obstinacy that had caused the folks in Plainfield to shake their heads when the name of young Marcus Whitman was mentioned stood him in good stead, for the more persistent the Englishman became in his objections the more adamantine grew the American in his determination to cling at all costs to his wagon, for no one knew better than Whitman that this had proved the most successful of the methods pursued by the great British fur monopoly to discourage the colonization of the territory wherein it conducted its operations. The officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company well knew that the colonization of the valley of the Columbia by Americans meant not only the end of their enormously profitable monopoly but the end of British domination in that region. Though they did not have it in their power to forcibly prevent Americans from entering the country, they argued that there could be no colonization on a large scale unless the settlers had wagons in which to transport their seeds and farming implements. Hence the company adopted the policy of stationing its agents along the main routes of travel with instructions to stop at nothing short of force to detain the wagons. And until Marcus Whitman came this policy had accomplished the desired result, the specious arguments of Captain Grant having proved so successful, indeed, that the stockade at Fort Hall was filled with abandoned wagons and farming implements which would have been of inestimable value to the settlers who had been persuaded or bullied into leaving them behind. But Whitman was made of different stuff, and the English official might as well have tried to argue the Snake River out of its course as to argue this hard-headed Yankee into giving up his wagon. Though it twice capsized and was all but lost in the swollen streams, though once it fell over a precipice and more than once went rolling down a mountainside, though for miles on end it was held on the narrow, winding mountain trails by means of drag-ropes, and though it became so dilapidated in time that it finished its journey on two wheels instead of four, the ramshackle old vehicle, thanks to Whitman’s bulldog grit and determination, was hauled over the mountains and was the first vehicle to enter the forbidden land. I have laid stress upon this incident of the wagon, because, as things turned out, it proved a vital factor in the winning of Oregon. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” runs the ancient doggerel; “for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the kingdom was lost.” And, had it not been for this decrepit old wagon of Whitman’s, a quarter of a million square miles of the most fertile land between the oceans would have been lost to the Union.