“The one you made me haul from Brownsville? I can get you a new modern one, have it freighted in.”
“Your father gave that to me and I know just how much green wood and how much dry to get the temperature just right.”
“Whatever you say, Mother.” He kissed me on the top of my head the way I once did to him.
Out in the sagebrush I built my house. On my own, hammering the walls in place, asking for brawn to set the beams but finding delight doing most of it myself as though I were a child making my own little wagon wheels out of fir ends. A young bachelor helped me arrange to pull water from the lake into my kitchen with lead pipes. Imagine! I pump right into my tin-lined sink. I heat that water on my cookstove.
I didn’t try to arrange a marriage for him with one of my granddaughters. I’m past arranging the lives of others.
Sometimes I am asked to speak at pioneer picnics where we reminisce about our journeys west, north, and east. I praise the bachelors who always found time to ride hard for a doctor or raise a roof or build a chimney for someone else. And I praise the women, young and old, married and widowed, who make lives for themselves, some even doing as I did but much younger: file on a claim, build a home, and make a life there, living simply.
Nancy came to visit me once. She has lived through her husband’s dying. She married a second time the year my grandson died of diphtheria. We were both already old, but she loved again and was willing to let another love her back.
“My Andrew is buried in a little Kees Cemetery we carved out of our property not all that far from Waiilatpu, near Weston.”
“Umatilla County now.”
“Yes. Pretty country.” I served her tea on my porch overlooking Lake Chelan. Gray laced her red hair; her freckles had faded. I noticed she left the cups alone, not moved to set them into a straight line. I commented on that.
“After my Andrew died, I sent the tortured thoughts away and vowed that if I loved again I would not waste time thinking of those events so far past. My second husband, William, tells me I am like a child with him, finding things to laugh about as much as I cry. I’ve buried that part of my life, Eliza. I no longer need to straighten everything out.”
After she left I sat on my little rocker and looking out over the lake, I decided I needed to go back to Lapwai, one more time.
I went by steamship, up the rivers. I arrived on a Sunday. Two women serve as missionaries there—Miss McBeth and her niece, Miss Crawford. How I admire their grit! The Indians seemed pleased to greet me, though they could not have ever met me. Timothy was gone now, but they knew of me as they did my father and, yes, most fortunately, my mother. I met Old Joseph’s daughter and Jim Moses, who took care of my father’s grave. And then we went into the church. I sat on the benches watching as the men and women filed in and suddenly the memories overwhelmed me—all I had been given in my life begun here.
I felt the tears come and swallowed quickly. I did not wish to cry. I listened as one of their own preached. I could not understand a word, but I didn’t condemn myself for that. At the end, Miss McBeth asked if I would like to say a word or two. I stood, my feet sore from too-tight shoes. I went barefoot often at my Chelan home. Another of their ministers translated for me and I told them of how proud I was to be among them, that they had been part of the forest of God’s trees, and like each of them, I was just one leaf. But that leaf had begun at Lapwai. And in keeping with the true meaning of The Peoples’ name, Nez Perce, I said that I pictured my parents “walking out of the woods through the forest.” Together. There were murmurs of approval. “I am proud to be the first white child born among you. Grateful I am that you helped raise me. I have done my best to bring comfort to others and bring the good words of Jesus to my family and friends too.” There were smiles and nods and then they sang a song my father or mother likely taught them. They sang it in English, the gesture like a cool breeze on a warming day. It was a hymn written the year my parents came west. “Savior, like a shepherd, lead us / how we need thy tender care.” By the time they sang the refrain of the final verse, Blessed Jesus, blessed Jesus, / thou has loved us, love us still, I had begun looking at every face, every child, hoping not to lose my memory of them nor my sight through the blurring of my tears. But I was lost: lost to their singing, lost to the memories, lost to the love. I cried like a baby.
“It is all right to cry with The People. It is all right to remember your parents and your precious lives here in Lapwai.” Miss McBeth put her hand on my shoulder, then held me with compassion. Although she spoke the words, I heard my mother’s calming voice instead, reminding me of the healing power of memories woven new with love.
Epilogue
LAPWAI, IDAHO
SEPTEMBER 11, 1913
My Dear Mrs. Warren,
Word came from the Presbytery that the remains were ready for shipment and should arrive here in a day or two but they did not reach here until Thursday. Many of The People had gone to the mountains already. It is that season. But Elder Jackson and the pastor went for the precious box and brought it to the church. They set it on two chairs in front of the pulpit with two dishes of lavender and asters at either end of the box no longer than three feet. These were later taken to the cemetery. The service was in Sahaptin and we sang a song she or your father had taught. Many whites from nearby Lewiston came to hear them speak of your mother’s life, her faithfulness to God and The People. At the graveside, the pastor spoke in English and we loved the picture that he painted of husband and wife arising together among the people on Resurrection morning. It is a fitting completion to their work.
Very sincerely yours,
K.C. McBeth
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments
Much has been written about the early continental crossings of the first non-Indian missionaries, especially Henry and Eliza Spalding and Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. But few have explored the impact of those two families on the lives of the Spalding children and what happened afterward. My story of Eliza Spalding Warren, the oldest child of Henry and Eliza, began in Brownsville, Oregon, several years ago when I was asked by Linda Lewis McCormick, a Brownsville booster extraordinaire, to speak to the Brownsville Women’s Club at their one hundredth anniversary. Following that festive event, Linda told me she was working on a book about Henry Harmon Spalding, who had lived in that small Willamette Valley community one hundred fifty years earlier. Linda suggested I might want to tell Eliza the daughter’s story. “His daughter stayed here most of her life, and when she married, her father went through town saying, ‘My daughter is dead! My daughter is dead!’” Well, there’s an unanswered question to warm a novelist’s heart.
When I read Eliza’s memoir, I was even more intrigued. I wanted to know more about her relationship to her mother and the ways we misinterpret our parents’ lives, especially when they are no longer alive for us to ask questions of for clarification. She wrote of her mother’s death in 1851 in Brownsville in her memoir and the first sentence after that was: “In 1854 I married Andrew Warren.” I wondered what had happened in that very large space between 1851 and 1854.
As I researched I rediscovered the entire mission period with the Spaldings and Whitmans, Eells and Smiths, and the turbulent times following the Whitmans’ deaths. I had known that Eliza was one of the hostages taken by the Cayuse but had not realized until reading her memoir that she had been the only person who could interpret Sahaptin—the language of the Cayuse and Umatila and the Nez Perce—and who also was fluent in Chinookan, the trade language made up of a mix of native and French and English words. She’d been asked to interpret, and at the age of ten, I imagined that this demand was a significant weight to carry in a sustained traumatic situation, the siege continuing for thirty-nine days before the British paid the ransom for their release. Equally demanding must have been the grief of the deaths and the month-long hostage siege. And the challenge of surviving.
Several accounts of the Waiilatpu events exist. I relied on Eliza Sp
alding’s account, some of the trial records, Henry Spalding’s later writings, a Catholic version recounted in a 1941 book, and several online family accountings, such as for Nancy Osborne (who lived in Brownsville when Eliza did). Matilda Sager’s account, along with her siblings’ and Lorinda Bewley’s stories and Stephenie Flora’s “Whitman Massacre Roster,” noted other accounts of survivors of the tragedy as well. Eliza’s recalling her lowest moment having to do with the Nez Perce family friend, Timothy, is taken from her memoir. Linda McCormick’s published history, The Spaldings of the West, proved invaluable in recreating an authentic understanding of the massacre.
Eliza’s trip back to Waiilatpu with Timothy is fiction, but something in her later life changed Eliza from what local interviews of people who had known her described as “an unhappy woman” to one willing and able to leave Brownsville for good and build her own home at the age of seventy. Her memoir reflects a woman of great strength who brought four children into the world whose descendants remember the stories of her fondly. Her presentation at the Pioneer Reunion at Crawfordsville in 1888 also presents her as a stalwart and loving woman. What I read there was a devotion to family unity and to preserving the memory of her mother’s work, especially among The People, who in many ways helped raise Eliza and gifted her with their own spiritual strength warmed by their conversion to Christianity. To this day there are descendants of those early converts who continue to practice the faith, just as there are descendants who returned to their native spiritual practices.
I have chosen to have Henry and Eliza Spalding use the name Nez Perce as well as Nimíipuu when they refer to The People they lived among. Eliza the daughter uses Nez Perce and The People. When the language of the Nez Perce is being spoken of, Sahaptin is the linguist group of the natives of that region. Chinookan was also used among whites and natives at that time.
The Spalding spelling was chosen as most historical, though the street in Brownsville named for Henry is spelled Spaulding and that spelling occurs on land documents from the time period. Either appears to be correct. Eliza the mother did keep a diary and many of her letters are also published. More material is also available at the Bancroft Library and the Presbyterian Historical Society’s archives in Philadelphia. The diary entries in this novel are my creation, using the tone of Eliza the mother, I hope, but giving words to things she never spoke of: her surviving a terrible tragedy when the Whitmans did not; her frustration with the Mission Board’s refusal to let them return to Lapwai. And I gave her an expression of some frustration with her husband, though she never criticizes him in her own diary. Still, the documented report by one of Henry’s professors of his student’s lack of common sense and quick temper rings true, as does that professor’s high regard for Eliza as a scholar, linguist, and thinker. One gets the impression that if she had been a man, she would have been given the post that she was allowed to serve only as a helpmate for in 1836.
The history of Brownsville, the Warrens’ decision to leave in 1859 and move to the Touchet country near where the tragedy took place, their return again to Brownsville, Henry’s response to all his daughters’ marriages, the sibling rivalry, Millie’s injury, Mr. Warren’s driving cattle across the Cascades where he did, and later Montana, his ups and downs and even a period when he was known to be drinking heavily (based on documents and interviews of Brownsville residents done in the 1930s), Henry’s temper, Rachel’s arrival and housekeeping foibles are all based on facts. Eliza Hart Spalding’s wedding ring is in a collection at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon. These facts and ephemera and love of history were provided in no small part by Linda McCormick’s own passion for the story of these families. I am forever indebted to her for her willingness to share her research, to speculate with me about the weaving of those facts into fiction, and for her review of the manuscript to correct and help me refine what I hope is a story that in many ways speaks to the power of memory and the suffering that old memories can bring into our present time.
In addition to Linda McCormick, I spoke with Carol Harrison of Monterey, California, a granddaughter of James, Eliza Spalding Warren’s son. She is engaged in writing her own book about her family in which she noted she has explored the political side of the Whitman and Spalding struggles. We have a shared admiration for the lives of the Elizas but differ in how their lives may have played out. I am grateful for her time and sharing with me.
A definitive work by Clifford Merrill Drury called Henry Harmon Spalding and his three-volume work First White Women over the Rockies and Where Wagons Could Go offer details of the lives of the first missionaries. His papers are part of the archival collection at Spokane, Washington. I relied on Joel Palmer’s work Journals of Travels over the Oregon Trail in 1845 for both the Nez Perce/Sahaptin and Chinook words I used as well as his commentary about meeting the Spaldings and the Whitmans during that year.
Eliza Spalding Warren’s Memories of the West was an invaluable aid that not only included her memories but also several photographs and excerpts from her mother’s overland journey of 1836. Laurie Winn Carlson’s work On Sidesaddles to Heaven: The Women of the Rocky Mountain Mission, read while researching an earlier trilogy, was reread, and once again I am grateful for her insights about all of the early Northwest missionaries. I also found James E. Bashford’s work The Oregon Missions written in 1918 to offer interesting insights as the bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Mantle of Elias: The Story of Fathers Blanchet and Demers in Early Oregon by M. Leona Nichols offered a different take on the trial of those charged for the Whitmans’ deaths and hostage-taking. Biography of Place by Martin Winch (Deschutes Historical Society) confirmed the route over the Cascades along the Santiam River that Eliza alluded to in her memoir. Mr. Winch provided the name Mr. Wiley, attributed to having made this first crossing in 1858 or 1859, which fit perfectly for Andrew Warren to have been one of the first to move cattle through that pass, a fact Eliza proudly mentions in her memoir. The journey up the east side of the Cascades would have taken them through a meadow (where my parents are buried in the Camp Polk cemetery) and north through the Warm Springs Indian Reservation toward The Dalles. The tragic winter of 1861–62 is documented in Oregon history and Eliza’s memoir, as is her journey east to Touchet following her husband but going with another couple and her four-month-old and two-and-a-half-year-old children by an oxen-pulled wagon.
Some of my readers may find the faith discussions in this book to be greater than usual. This is due in no small part to the evidence of such faith moving in the lives of these people long before they became characters in my story. Eliza the mother’s conversion to Christianity as a young woman, her pull to go west with her missionary husband, her willingness to travel sidesaddle across the continent along with Narcissa Whitman (who had rejected Henry Spalding’s offer of marriage but a short time before—now there’s a story!), and her devotion to The People and their devotion to her are all a part of this woman’s profound and humble faith. It shaped her life in much the way that Pulitzer Prize–winner Wallace Stegner once wrote in an essay about the West. “It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners—to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity and hopefulness of the west.”1 Both Elizas were shaped by such a West and by their Christian faith.
The intricacies of Eliza the daughter’s family life, the struggles with her father, her sisters sometimes living with her, sometimes not, are based on census data, letters, and a fascinating piece written by the housekeeper of Millie, Mrs. Lizzie Reinhart Weber, in her later years. In it she describes Eliza coming to the luxurious house John Brown built for Millie on the original Spalding homestead to get a cutting of a flower, but she did not go upstairs to visit her invalid sister. Were there longstanding issues? Was it sibling rivalry, older sister being miffed at a perceived coddling of youngest sister? Or was Eliza simply in a hurry that day? Clearly family was important to her, and her sisters did spend much of their time with her and Andrew Warren, in
cluding following them to Touchet with their father and Rachel.
I am indebted to a Brownsville history written by Margaret Standish Carey and Patricia Hoy Hainline and to a series of columns they wrote for the local newspaper called Past Times. I appreciated Glenn Harrison, a Linn County and Oregon Trail historian, who provided details of churches Henry Spalding started in the area as well as other resources and access to his books by Clifford Drury. Sharon and Terry McCoy of Atavista Farm in Brownsville shared their lovely home once lived in by Amelia “Millie” Spalding Brown, youngest sibling of Eliza Warren, and provided a copy of that letter from Mrs. Weber, her housekeeper/caregiver. Most of Mrs. Weber’s comments were related to Millie’s invalid status and her unhappy marriage, but she did comment about Eliza’s distance from her sister as well. The McCoys also had several newspaper clippings believed to be from the Democrat-Herald about the loss of the Warren home by fire in 1973, leaving only the smokehouse; articles about Timothy meeting Eliza years later; and a newspaper account of the mute Indian who remembered Eliza from when he cared for her as a child. The Brownsville Historical Museum provided many documents, including a copy of “In the Days of Pioneers” by Cyrus H. Walker and a newspaper story “In Earlier Days” by Fred Lockley.
An article with pictures of American Indian Art magazine of 1977 included information about Henry Spalding’s relationship with one of the Board members and Henry’s shipment of Nez Perce regalia and daily items of both a practical nature and beauty in exchange for necessities such as hoes and plows and children’s clothing. The story of the first printing press and the publication of the Nez Perce primer and the book of Matthew are based on facts provided by a number of sources, but of special note was a copy of the diary provided to me by hospital chaplain and descendant Kit Hall. The diary was kept by Sarah Hall on her overland journey bringing the printing press. Eliza the mother’s use of pictures she drew, her facility with languages, and the other missionaries’ ire about the Spaldings teaching in Sahaptin, the Nez Perce language, rather than in English and their conversions in the native language are all documented.