Waiilatpu: The Cayuse War and the Trials That Followed

At Celilo Falls in September 1836, Narcissa Whitman stood on the basalt above the roaring Columbia, watched men on scaffolds dip salmon out of the foam, and wrote in her journal that she wanted to weep for joy. She had ridden two thousand miles with her husband Marcus, a physician and minister, to bring the gospel to the peoples of the Oregon Country. She did not yet know what the country would ask of her in return.

The Whitmans built their mission at Waiilatpu, among the Cayuse, who called themselves Liksiyu: horse people of the grasslands between the Walla Walla and Umatilla rivers, famous for their ponies, fishing at the falls and digging camas in the spring meadows. In the autumn of 1847 measles swept through their lodges. Cayuse children died while most of the white children the doctor treated recovered, and his medicine began to look like poison. On November 29, Cayuse men killed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman; before it was over, eleven others at the mission were dead and the survivors were being held captive.

War followed, as Oregon volunteers rode into the Cayuse country, and then a trial: in June 1850 five Cayuse men were hanged at Oregon City. After that come the treaty of 1855, the survivors, life on the reservation, and the long argument over how the killings would be remembered, down to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla govern themselves today.