Eliza Spalding Warren letter to Clarence Leroy Andrews regarding the Whitman Massacre, January 19, 1894

• Main Author: Warren, Eliza Spalding
• Other Authors: University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections Division.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Subjects: Warren; Eliza Spalding; 1837-1919 > Correspondence; Andrews; Clarence Leroy; 1862-1948 > Correspondence; Whitman Massacre; 1847; Hudson; Hudson Bay
• Online Access: http://cdm16786.contentdm.oclc.org:80/cdm/ref/collection/pioneerlife/id/3284

Eliza Spalding Warren, who was ten years old at the time of the Whitman Massacre, writes to Clarence Leroy Andrews in response to his request for more information regarding her experiences. She mentions fellow survivors Catherine Pringle Sager, Lorinda Bewley, and offers advice on which historical accounts of the day might be most reliable. The Whitman Massacre took place on Nov. 29, 1847, at Waiilatpu, a Christian mission on the Walla Walla River, when missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and twelve male residents of the mission were murdered by a small band of Cayuse. The Cayuse blamed Whitman for a measles epidemic that had killed many members of the tribe, and also feared that he was bringing in too many white settlers. More than forty women and children, including Eliza Spalding, Lorinda Bewley, and the surviving Sager orphans Catherine, Elizabeth, Matilda and Henrietta, were subsequently taken captive by the Cayuse but were later ransomed by Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson Bay Company. Although only ten years old at the time of the massacre, Eliza played a vital role in that she was the only survivor who knew enough of the Cayuse language to be able to understand their captors. Her father, Henry Harmon Spalding, another white missionary stationed 120 miles away at Lapwai, had just left Eliza at the mission for schooling and was himself nearly killed as he tried to return to Lapwai.