Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce

1843

. . . In an effort to undo the damage, Whitman rode to the East during the winter of 1842-43 and succeeded in having the board rescind its order. In his absence, however, significant developments occurred. The Whitmans were ill-suited as missionaries and had offended many Cayuses. Some of them had heard the Waiilatpu missionaries express hopes that white families beginning to arrive in the Northwest on the Oregon Trail would settle around the mission, and they were fearful that Whitman had gone to the East to get more whites who would take their lands. . . . Soon after his departure . . . some Cayuses threatened Narcissa and burned the Waiilatpu gristmill.

News of the occurrences induced Dr. Elijah White, newly arrived in the Willamette Valley as U. S. subagent to the Oregon Indians, to lead a party up the Columbia to investigate. Visiting both Waiilatpu and Lapwai, White decided to take steps to shore up the missionaries’ authority over the Indians. Calling councils of the leading men at both places, he persuaded the two tribes to accept a set of laws which he had composed, probably with the advice of Spalding. They concerned such matters as murder, damaging property, and stealing.

White and Spalding thought the provisions dealt with all the principal offenses by the Indians which the missionaries had experienced. But the Indians would discover that the laws were both harsh and unjust and, while enforced against themselves, could not be made to apply to whites. At the same time, Spalding also complained of the loose governmental structure in which each band was autonomous. Without centralized, responsible tribal leadership, the laws could not be enforced, because headmen would continue to refuse to take responsibility for, or punish, wrongdoers whom they could claim were not members of their own band. To meet this problem, White directed the headmen of all the bands of each tribe, for the first time in their history, to choose a single "high chief of the tribe, and acknowledge him as such by universal consent."

The order, which contained the seed of continual discord, rivalry, and factionalism among the Indians, confused the Nez Perces, who were unable to settle on a choice. Under great pressure from White’s party, however, they finally agreed to accept the subagent’s candidate, Ellice, or, as Spalding spelled it, Ellis, the 32-year old grandson of the venerable war chief, Red Grizzly Bear. A product of the Red River school, Ellis spoke English, was a member of the pro-mission element in the tribe and friendly to Spalding, and had his own farm in the Kamiah region, as well as some sheep and cattle, which he had gotten in trade at Hudson’s Bay Company posts, and a herd of more than 1,100 horses. After selecting twelve subchiefs, each with five police assistants, for the Nez Perces, and fastening a similar head-chief government on the Cayuses, White and his party returned to the Willamette Valley confident that they had strengthened the missionaries’ position.

In the long run, their hopes were doomed. Spalding had already created a rift among the Nez Perces between those who supported him and seemed to want to become Christians and those who ignored him or were actively hostile to him. The former he called "the Christian party" and the latter "the heathens." For a while after White’s departure, he had an easier time. More Nez Perces participated in religious services and followed Spalding’s sermons, and some 225 students, half of them adults, dutifully attended the mission school. About 100 students were "printing their own books with a pen." Spalding also reported that 140 Nez Perces had their own farms or were raising livestock, and that a number of women were learning to card, spin, weave, sew, and knit from Mrs. Spalding. Slowly a group of "civilized," or partly acculturated, Nez Perces was forming, and many of these learning the white man’s skills and beliefs would never abandon them. But the new laws and head-chief government only deepened the rift Spalding had started. Though his opponents for a time let him alone, resentments smoldered and gradually increased. Ellis was a young man, with less standing than others, and most chiefs and headmen believed that he had no right to his position and ignored him. They refused to observe the laws or carry out punishments, and gradually enforcement broke down. In time, overt opposition to the missionaries surfaced again, and it became obvious that the headmen and their bands would not, or could not, adjust to giving up their autonomy and accepting a strange new form of government in which someone of lesser prestige and not of their won band would have missionary-directed authority over them. As friction broke out again, it appeared, moreover, that the Christian element, though determinedly loyal to the Spaldings, was in the minority.

Following Whitman’s return in 1843, the missionaries’ position continued to deteriorate. Whitman, accompanied by a 13-year old nephew, Perrin Whitman, rode back across the plains with the first large emigration to Oregon, some 1,000 settlers in covered wagons. Though the emigrants went on to the Willamette Valley, the Cayuses were sure that more would come and settle on their lands. (pp. 71-73)