I move through the world with a familial sense but without much communal drive. I don’t have an intense desire to socialize with neighbors or to help out with the PTA or to gather around backyard fire pits making small talk on the 4th of July. Maybe I would have perished if I had lived long ago in tribes. Or, maybe I would have been left alone to tend to something quiet and solitary.
With the birth of each of our children, I kept thinking this will be my chance to finally evolve into a participatory sort, a playdate maker, a small talker, a joiner, a helper, a contributor, a soccer mom, a baker of treats, a giver of parties. But alas, our youngest son is now eleven and I am still a solitary creature mostly uninterested in any person I haven’t known for more than half my life.
Maybe living in a different century, I would have been the type to strike out for the frontier on the ultimate road trip, The Oregon Trail. Giving up the neighborhood, the marked territory of the subdivision, for the great wide open. Exchanging the known world to explore the lands out west sounds like something I could support. I can get untethered from the community so easily, it seems natural to think I would be up for a major relocation and would enjoy going from town to town on a journey never growing roots deep enough to hurt when pulled up for the next part of the westward push.
When we visited The Whitman Mission in Walla Walla, Washington, I was intrigued first with the idea of leaving home and all the things it sets in motion. The Whitmans were traveling west for their god, seeking the wild in order to tame it, not to savor it. They wanted to share with Native Americans the glory and order of the civilized subdivision. They wanted to hack up the land into postage stamp squares of backyard, partition it with fences, and move in measures of time through the seasons rooted with self-reliance.
Before heading west, in 1819, Narcissa Whitman, caught up in the Second Great Awakening, attended a revival and committed her life to Christ. She was eleven and by sixteen, she was intent on spreading the word of God through missionary work, but first she needed a husband for the sake of convention. God was not enough accompaniment for a woman when traveling to distant lands. Narcissa may well have prayed to Cupid, for Marcus Whitman was on a similar path to God and service as a teenager. He also wanted to be a missionary and set his destiny from a young age, but first he gained the practical skills needed to support his message of grace and mercy. Marcus became a doctor. Ultimately, his ability to save lives would do more for folks out west than his ability to save souls. The benefits of science were sometimes welcomed where religion was not.
Eventually, Marcus and Narcissa found each other and bound themselves together in a shared purpose to establish a mission in “heathen lands.” Their wedding day hymns celebrated their commitment to mission work. There were no songs of romantic love or promises to each other, only the words…
….To redeem a world from hell!
Let me hasten, let me hasten
Far in heathen lands to dwell.
I do like the idea of setting a path on your wedding day to some shared vision for a life together. Instead of the wedding march, send me down the aisle to Bruce Springsteen’s hymn to the open road “Thunder Road” or to Morrissey’s hymn to die together “There is a light that never goes out.”
Marcus and Narcissa left the day after their wedding for a honeymoon in “heathen lands.’’ They were destined for Oregon Country! The journey was fraught with twists and turns and tribulations as all road trips tend to be but maybe the fugue state of new marriage and leaving home and their conviction of purpose sustained them for the seven months they spent together on the road.
As the Whitmans traveled west, the native Cayuse people of the Pacific Northwest, were primed for an incoming clash of cultures. The Cayuse had steadily opened themselves up to the fur traders road tripping on the Oregon Trail following Lewis and Clark’s adventures and engaging a spirit of opportunity, adventure, and exploration. Fur traders were missionaries of a different sort, peddling economics, finding new consumer groups and establishing a timeworn business model of supply and demand on the frontier. The Cayuse were willing converts to the white man’s trade and for some, the Whitmans’ religion. The Cayuse, by most accounts, were not converted in a revivalist frenzy of belief. The Cayuse were drawn to the power of the white man’s god, not the saving grace of it; any god that would equip his people with guns and ammo and lead, was a god worth knowing.
While I often think of Native Americans as very spiritual, very in tune with the unseen forces at work in our world, their response to Christianity seems very practical. Perhaps, religion homes in on what we lack and starts filling us up. The Cayuse didn’t lack for spirituality or connection to something deep and meaningful and benevolent; they only lacked weapons and technology equal to the masses that were coming for their land. They lacked power and knew a good alliance when they saw it.
Much to the surprise of many of the Mission’s inhabitants, the Whitmans had something even more irresistible than a powerful god, they had a new beautiful baby girl, born on the sacred Cayuse land in their midst and with their help. Baby Alice was seen as a blessing to both tribes of people. How many babies have been a bridge to understanding and acceptance, forgiveness and redemption, saviors of spiraling families and conflicted communities?
For a while, Baby Alice was pure potential and promise for the Mission. She broke barriers and created bonds among the two groups of people in ways a only a baby can. Hope was alive and coexistence seemed possible until the river came calling for her like a greedy spirit taking her soul and the future of the community along with it. The river may as well have risen up in flood for everyone at the Whitman Mission with the widespread ruin it created in the wake of Alice’s drowning.
If Alice had lived, maybe she could have softened her father’s heart to the Cayuse ways and customs, maybe she could have sweetened her father’s language when he spoke to the Cayuse. If Alice had lived, maybe she would have set the standard for cultural exchange, led with her innocence and complexity to hold two truths in her heart.
Instead, a rot bloomed after Alice drowned. Some people would call it a curse, some would call it grief, some would call it lost faith, some would call it manifest destiny, some would call it the inevitability of disease. There are a thousand faults and a thousand more mistakes that lay a track to ruin at The Whitman Mission after Alice drowned. Narcissa was lost forever in sorrow, sunk in the darkness of depression. Marcus gave up on converting the Cayuse and focused instead on white settlement in Walla Walla, a betrayal felt deep and true by the Cayuse who were helpless to stop the incoming tide of emigrants who brought their white picket fences and the measles with them.
It wasn’t long before the tomahawks were hurtling in rage and nine people at the mission were killed including Marcus and Narcissa. The Cayuse intended to drive away the evil spirits of the mission, but the killings only stirred the spirits more and soon militias were sent to protect the settlers living on the frontier and to serve as cover as white settlers stole more of their land.
The National Park Service isn’t afraid to try to tell the true story of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Cayuse. It is complex with contradictions and complications. Their story is a reminder for all of us that sometimes our zeal for the things we love and the primal urge we sometimes have to convince others to love the same things we do can have unintended consequences for all. It also serves as a bit of self-justification for me and the comfortable way I navigate the world. I have no missionary desire to convince others to be the way I am and I buck up against circumstances and sometimes even people that come my way trying to proselytize with shiny new commitments and connections. The Whitmans’ lesson for me is to mind my own business, tend to my own fields, enjoy the small space I call home, and not venture out much beyond my immediate family for the things I need. That’s the beauty of traveling to a place like Walla Walla and learning the story of the Whitmans and the Cayuse, there’s a lesson there for everyone.
In ‘Candide’ Voltaire came to similar conclusions about “cultivating one’s own garden” in the face of misplaced hope in politics, science, religion, progress, well, in hope for all overreaching human endeavors really. Well done author.
so good!!