Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, It's Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West

Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, It's Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West by Blaine Harden

In 1847, the missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were killed by members of the Cayuse tribe near present-day Walla Walla, Washington. A final response to years of Cayuse frustration with the Whitmans, the event recorded in Western history as the Whitman Massacre was a tipping point in American expansion, leading Congress to make the Oregon Country an official U.S. territory. It also became the kernel of a triumphal fiction of Western expansionism peddled by hucksters who would distort the actual history of how the U.S. became a continental nation. Their lie would torment the Cayuse tribe for more than 150 years.

The fable's principal author was the Reverend Henry Spalding, a fellow missionary who, for his own personal gain, invented a story that portrayed his slain colleague as a heroic patriot and a Christian martyr. As Spalding told it, before Whitman was killed, he had ridden his horse across the country to Washington, D.C., where he persuaded the president to "save" Oregon from a British and Catholic plot to steal the Northwest away from the United States. Spalding persuaded Congress to endorse and print his myth. It was presented as fact in the New York Times and the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and, by the end of the nineteenth century, Marcus Whitman was widely recognized as one of the most significant men in American history. Meanwhile, as the killers of a man now falsely hailed as a national hero, the Cayuses were demonized, hanged, dispossessed, and cheated. Along with two neighboring tribes, they were stripped of nearly all their land and consigned to the Umatilla Reservation in northeast Oregon.

In this fascinating, impeccably researched narrative, New York Times bestselling author Blaine Harden traces the origins and effects of a foundational American myth across more than a century. Exposing the self-serving nature of American mythmaking, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the dark realities of American expansion and the lies that can persist when history is told only by victors.

Viking, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2021