Eliza Spalding Warren letter to Mr. Clarence Leroy Andrews regarding details of the Whitman Massacre

• 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; Frontier and pioneer life > Washington (State) > Walla Walla; Indians of North America; Whitman Massacre; 1847; Hudson Bay; Hudson; Perce
• Online Access: http://cdm16786.contentdm.oclc.org:80/cdm/ref/collection/pioneerlife/id/3294

Eliza Spalding Warren writes to Clarence Leroy Andrews in response to his request for information regarding her missionary parents, Henry Harmon and Eliza Hart Spalding, and for her memories of the Whitman Massacre, which she witnessed in 1847 at the age of ten. Eliza describes her parents' arduous trip West with the Whitmans and how her family settled with the Nez Perce Indians of present day Lapwai, Idaho, while the Whitmans went on to settle among the Cayuse near present day Walla Walla, Washington. She comments on her family's positive relationships with the Nez Perce and describes how, in 1847, she is taken to the Whitman Mission for schooling and comes to be there at the time of the massacre. She recalls how Timothy, a chief of the Nez Perce, is sent to rescue her but her Cayuse captors refuse to let her go. She concludes by remarking how it is the "greatest pleasure of my heart" to travel through that region now for its beauty and industry. The Whitman Massacre took place at Waiilatpu, near the present day site of Walla Walla, Washington, on Nov. 29, 1847, 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.