It's smart to always have a few financial goals.
And a really smart one you can set, earning cash back on what you buy every day.
And with Discover, you can.
Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year.
Seriously. All of it.
And we trust you to make smart decisions.
After all, you listen to this show.
See terms at discover .com slash credit card. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please feel the love of everything good in this world, stop.
With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.
Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.
Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile .com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required.
Intro rate for three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
See full terms at mintmobile .com The History Channel Original Podcast Hey, everyone.
Sally here. This week's episode is a deep dive into a story featured on Kevin Costner's The West, a new History Channel TV series.
From executive producers Kevin Costner and Doris Kearns Goodwin, it takes a fresh look at the history of the American West by delving into the epic struggle for the land itself.
Check out new episodes of Kevin Costner's The West on the History Channel, premiering on Memorial Day, or stream the next day at History .com.
History This Week, May 30th, 1855.
I'm Sally Helm. A grassy plain near present -day Walla Walla, Washington.
About 5 ,000 native people have gathered from five different tribes.
— the Walla Walla, Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, and the Cayuse.
They're here to negotiate a treaty, one that will change the shape of the United States.
A man named Isaac Stephens steps out to address the crowd.
He's the governor of the newly incorporated Washington Territory.
He wants to end the bloodshed that has plagued the Columbia River basin for the last eight years.
but he wants more than that.
He's pretty clear about it.
He wants these people to abandon their way of life and adopt his.
He says, you'll all become farmers and mechanics and doctors and lawyers, like white men.
Also, you'll go live on some tracts of land around here, reservations.
And we'll take the rest. The tribal leaders have little choice but to accept.
Stevens reportedly told one of them, the Yakama chief Kamiakin, if you do not accept the terms offered, you will walk in blood knee -deep.
When the Walla Walla Council ends two weeks later, these tribes have ceded 60 ,000 square miles of land to the U .S. government.
This treaty — it's the origin story for the In addition, the map is complete.
The lower 48 states you'd recognize, sea to shining sea.
This has long been the ambition.
But the reason the annexation happens at this precise moment, that goes back to a really particular event.
What some call a justified killing and others call a massacre.
The Whitman's were white missionaries living near one of these tribes, the Cayuse.
And after the Whitman's die, life for Native Americans in this region is never the same.
92 percent of our homeland, we are dispossessed of 92 percent of our homeland in the treaty -making process.
And by taking the lives of the Whitman's, we ushered that chapter in more quickly.
Today, the Whitman killing or the Whitman massacre.
After an initial period of relative peace, how do things go so wrong?
And why did these particular deaths lead to a massive expansion of the United States?
Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
That is how long the Cayuse have lived in the Pacific Northwest. So we have been here a very long time.
Bobbie Connor is director of the Thomaslicht Cultural Institute.
She says, the Cayuse settled right on the border of present day Washington and Oregon.
This was somewhere between 16 and 20 ,000 years ago, before the glaciers retreated from what's now the United States.
We have oral histories about the people who escaped those massive glacial melt floods.
There are other tribes in the area, but the Cayuse keep somewhat to themselves.
They were a mountain people and they were expected to be excellent in whatever they did.
I think of that in the same way I think of samurai.
In their insular, rigorous, demanding culture.
The Cayuse are probably most famous as skilled horsemen.
Horses aren't native to the Americas, but once they arrive, the Cayuse master riding and breeding and soon owned some of the fastest horses in the American West. They were fierce on horseback.
They were fierce on foot.
And when they were hospitable, they had a fierce sense of hospitality.
When they asked you to sit down and eat, sit down and eat.
Because they wanted to be fully in command of taking care of you.
At first, that hospitality extends to Christian missionaries, who begin arriving in Cayuse lands in the mid -1830s.
They're riding the winds of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that inspires thousands of Americans in the early 19th century.
Around 1790, only about one in ten Americans went to church regularly.
Blaine Harden, author of the book, Murder at the Mission.
After the Second Great Awakening, by 1835, about eight in ten Americans went to church regularly.
The American population had been swept by evangelical Protestantism.
These missionaries aren't the first white people that the Cayuse have encountered.
They trade regularly with the Hudson's Bay Company.
Those horses they breed are quite valuable, and the Cayuse are happy to exchange them for Western tools that can make their tribe more powerful.
The Cayuse never numbered more than 800 people.
But they were particularly good at adopting Western technology.
They had rifles, they had steel knives, so they punched well above their weight.
So when the Cayuse hear about Christianity, they first associate it with these other aspects of white culture and life.
things like steel or horses.
When they heard that the Americans had a spiritual toolkit, a kind of Western religious technology that they equated with horses and knives and rifles, they thought, well, we want some of that because there are white people moving around and things are changing.
We need to get the spiritual power.
According to Hardin, the Cayuse and other tribes in the region, they express some openness toward Christianity as a supplement to their own religion.
They have no intention of abandoning their own spiritual traditions.
That distinction gets a little lost in translation.
And when white missionaries hear stories about any openness to Christianity, they really run with it.
They thought, well, you know, we want to convert people, and now it looks like these native people want to be converted themselves.
They're hungry for Christ. One of these missionaries is Marcus Whitman.
He was born in upstate New York in a place that became known as the Burned Over District, because the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening burned right through it.
As a young person, he would have seen these traveling revivals, where sermons and prayer circles and groups singing could last all day and into the night.
As a teenager, Whitman experienced a religious awakening.
He wanted to become a minister, but his family convinced him that medicine was more practical.
Fast -forward, he's 32, a practicing doctor, when he attends a lecture by a minister who tells this story that has taken hold, that there are tribes out West who want to be converted.
And Marcus Whitman, he finds himself filled with missionary zeal.
This lecturing minister says he needs help spreading the gospel and Marcus wants to do it.
There's just one problem with convincing the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions to send him west. He's single.
They wanted him to be married because she would help him and she would also keep him from fraternizing with Indian women, which was important in their view.
Luckily, just a few days after Whitman raises his hand to go West, that minister delivers another lecture.
And who should hear it but Narcissa Prentiss, an unmarried woman who is also inspired to go West. She just needs a husband.
And the match is made.
He proposed, she accepted, they did their marital business in about a day.
And the day after they were married, they left for the West. They're not alone.
They're traveling with another married couple, Henry and Eliza Spaulding.
Which is a little awkward, because seven years earlier, Henry Spaulding had proposed to Narcissa Whitman.
She rejected him. So, this month long journey on what will become known as the Oregon Trail, it has its tense moments.
Narcissa later wrote to her father saying we never should have traveled west with this guy.
He harbors all these ill -fillings and jealousies towards me and Marcus.
The missionaries do finally make it to their destination in the fall of 1836.
At that point, the two couples really had had enough of each other.
Henry Spaulding was so annoying and precipitated so many arguments that they decided they had to live a long ways away from each other.
The Spauldings settle next to the Nez Perce tribe, and the Whitmans go 120 miles away near a small Cayuse village.
This land belongs to the Cayuse.
It is not part of the United States.
It's not even a territory yet.
When the Whitmans first arrive, the Cayuse are away on their annual fall hunt.
And when the tribe returns, they embrace the newcomers with that legendary Cayuse hospitality.
And Marcus Whitman, remember, is a doctor.
He connects with the Cayuse early on by healing some of the tribe's members.
But he is also warned by some nearby traders that this could be dangerous.
If you choose a mission among the Cayuse, you must know this, they will kill you if you are an unsuccessful medicine man.
Bobby Conner says Whitman is considered a T -WAT, a supernatural healer.
Narcissa Whitman wrote at the time, it has been and still is the case with them when one dies in your care, they will hold you responsible for his life and you are in great danger of being killed.
It was a contract. When a patient dies, there can be a malpractice suit.
Well, this is the cost of surgery gone wrong.
It's a malpractice execution.
Whitman knows this and knows it's a risk.
But nevertheless, he treats a case of pneumonia in the tribe early on.
And luckily, he's successful.
So relations remain strong, especially after the birth of the Whitman's daughter, Alice.
She was a precocious little girl who was much -welcomed by the Cayuse.
The tribe's headman, Tillichikt, visits the baby shortly after her birth, and designates her a Cayuse Ti -Mai, or Cayuse girl, since she had been born on their land.
There was a general feeling that the birth of this daughter, who was the first white baby born in the region, that this was a good omen.
The Whitman's feel that their mission is going well.
I thought, you know, this is going to be easy.
These people are interested, and they also have some knowledge of what we're trying to do.
The Cayuse had had some introduction to Christian practices.
They knew how to pray.
They knew how to sing.
And they were willing to sit and listen to a sermon. Till La Caix and the other tribe members also seem willing to learn farming.
And that's important to Marcus's mission.
He wants them to abandon their nomadic hunter -gatherer lifestyle so that they can stay in one place year -round and go to church. More missionaries arrive, and there are some squabbles, but relations are so far basically good.
Alice, now two years old, is even picking up the local language.
But then tragedy strikes.
June 23rd, 1839. Marcus and Narcissa are busy reading and their daughter Alice goes down to the river to fill two cups of water.
Somehow, she falls in and drowns.
Narcissa really never recovered from the heartbreak of that drowning.
She basically turned away from her missionary vocation and really did not have a whole lot to do with the Cayuse.
Relations with the Cayuse go downhill.
Marcus was probably a better farmer than he was a doctor or missionary and they watched as he prospered, as his crops grew, and so they said, why don't you start paying us some rent?
The Whitmans refuse.
The Cayuse are angry.
At one point, the headman, Tillichyke, tugs on Marcus Whitman's ears, apparently to indicate that, on this topic, he should be a better listener.
Whitman doesn't relent.
So, Tillichyke throws Whitman's hat to the ground.
The leaders of the Cayuse tribe told them to either pay rent or to leave, and then ordered them to leave. But the Whitman's refused to leave. Underneath it all, the Wippmans and the other missionaries are pretty contemptuous of the Cayuse.
They utterly looked down on the Cayuse's religious practices, and also on the way the Cayuse lived.
The Cayuse may have been willing to sit in church or even recite some prayers, but the Whitman's basically don't convert any of them.
The mission is failing.
And soon Marcus gets a letter from the missionary board. You've been fired.
You're coming home.
But Marcus, he's not taking this lying down.
He travels six months back to headquarters in Boston.
And he did persuade the board to change its mind.
Whitman has the mandate he needs.
Now, he'll come back to the Cayuse with renewed purpose.
And he's not alone.
He returned on the largest wagon train up to that point over the Oregon Trail.
Marcus Whitman returns to Cayuse lands along with a flood of other white settlers.
There were hundreds of them.
And then there were thousands of them.
StoryTours So History this Week is now in its sixth season.
Kind of crazy. And we love bringing you these stories.
All of our work is supported by the ads you hear on the show, but if you don't want to hear those ads, we're now introducing History this Week Plus, available exclusively on Apple podcasts.
For just $2 .99 per month, you'll get all of our new episodes without any of the ads, and will be adding ad -free versions of our older episodes to.
So subscribe now and get your first week free.
History this week, plus exclusively on Apple podcasts.
At New Balance we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it.
Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way.
And that's what running is all about.
Run your way at NewBalance .com slash running.
Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history.
I do that through storytelling.
History that Doesn't Suck is a chart -topping history telling podcast, chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade.
Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more.
The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock.
Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the US.
Fortunately there's LifeLock.
LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity.
If your identity is stolen, a US -based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back.
Save up to 40 % your first year by visiting lifelock .com slash podcast. Terms apply.
In the four years after Marcus Whitman's return, from 1843 to 1847, 10 ,000 white settlers will land in Oregon Country.
A shock. An absolute shock to the Cayuse.
The first white people to head out to Cayuse lands were missionaries like the Whitman's, and there were just a handful of them.
But these new settlers are coming in much greater numbers, and they're not missionaries.
Many of them are fueled by the fervor of Manifest Destiny.
They want to take the continent for America.
Marcus Whitman, he started out with a different fervor, a fervor for spreading the gospels.
But over his seven years in the West, he has transformed.
It's about manifest destiny for him now, too.
Whitman wanted this to be American.
He said we need to bring these American Protestants to the West so that this will be an extension of the United States.
Whitman writes at the time, I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country.
They're going to take this land over.
And as important the Cayuse began to perceive that he was more of an impresario of white settlement than he was a Christian minister to their needs.
Whitman's tone toward the Cayuse becomes much more antagonizing.
They wanted the Cayuse to renounce their nomadic ways, to dress like white people and to act like white people.
They wanted us to sit still year -round, not travel our seasonal cycles on horseback to gather our foods.
They weren't interested in our way of life.
They were interested in teaching us theirs.
At one point, Marcus Whitman is upset about some wolves who are ruining his crops and killing his livestock.
He plants some meat laced with poison to kill them.
It was hanging up and Indian people ate it and got sick.
Those who were poisoned nearly died, but, you know, it was an accident.
In another incident, though, one of the missionaries decides to teach the Cayuse a lesson.
mission had, as part of its crops, a patch of melons.
They wanted to teach us about personal property, and they put an emetic in the watermelons to teach us not to take them without permission, and people got sick.
It just became clear to the Cayuse that this was a huge mistake, having these missionaries.
1847 is the largest year of migration along the Oregon Trail yet.
And those white settlers bring measles.
The Cayuse and other tribes have no immunity.
The disease rips through the population.
In one village, the story is that there's no adult left to bury the dead.
We can't even have a burial ceremony because there's no one to conduct it.
So this epidemic and the enormously terrifying death toll sort of combined with the longstanding resentment of the Whitman's on the part of the Cayuse to create really a lot of anger and rage.
And then a conspiracy theory began to float around in Cayuse country that said that the Whitman's were planning to poison the Cayuse and take their land.
It was not hard to believe.
After all, Whitman and the missionaries had used poison before, poison that had made the Cayuse sick, and now the Cayuse are dying in droves of this new disease.
Now Marcus Whitman, remember, is a doctor.
And during the epidemic, he does try to help.
But the results do not look good.
When he is a physician with Minister aid to white people, most of them lived.
When he tried to doctor our Indian children, Indian adults, most of them died.
His technique for helping to mitigate the symptoms of the disease was to bleed people and sometimes roll them in the snow.
This, of course, did not help people recover from the measles, and so Whitman, by the measure of the Cayuse tradition, was a failed medicine man, and he deserved to be killed.
For the Cayuse, November 29, 1847, is a particularly dark moment of this measles epidemic.
They have buried nine people in about a 24 -hour period.
They buried three children that morning.
A small group of Cayuse approach the Whitman home, asking for medicine.
They enter the kitchen.
One of them drives a hatchet into Whitman's head.
For good measure, they shoot him dead.
And then they all went outside and a general bloodletting began.
Eleven white men were killed.
That's including Marcus Whitman.
The Cayuse did not kill women or children, the only woman they killed was Narcissa.
Eleven white men and Dr. Whitman and Narcissa were all buried in a shallow mass grave. It's a brutal attack.
And in the immediate aftermath, there's outrage on both sides.
The Cayuse largely distance themselves from the violence.
The men responsible took 47 hostages who fall under the care of other tribal members, and a large group of Cayuse decide, OK, this kind of thing can't continue.
There are people who are engaged to write a letter to the Oregon Provisional Government to have a peace council set up so that we can prevent further bloodshed.
The peace council negotiates the hostages release.
But that doesn't sate the anger of the white settlers.
They soon raise a militia to exact vengeance on the cayas and also to take their land.
It becomes known as the Cayuse War, but that would presume armed combatants against armed combatants.
It was volunteer militia against villages, so it's not a war.
It's an attack on our people.
In one instance, Nez Perce tribe members try to stop some militiamen from stealing their cattle.
The militiamen simply kill them.
People just keep dying.
Any chance to shoot an Indian, they do.
There's now a provisional government in Oregon Territory, and they put pressure on the Cayuse leadership.
They want someone to pay for the women's deaths.
Soon, five Cayuse men go to the officials to explain what happened.
how it happened, why it started, that the killing of Whitman is an accepted law in our culture because he was a medicine man and his medicine didn't work, it poisoned our people.
The men are arrested.
One of them is Tillekeit, the Cayuse headman who was one of the first to embrace the Whitmans.
But now, this attack has set a chain of events in motion that will be devastating for the Cayuse.
As he's being transported to stand trial, Til Lekkeicht reportedly says, Just as your Christ died for the sins of all people, so do we sacrifice ourselves for the other Cayuse people.
It's clean, crisp, and actually smells like someone you want to cuddle.
And it's in Walmart, Target, and other stores now for under $4.
So toss one in your cart and find out why it's the best selling men's antiperspirant for the last decade.
Degree Cool Rush is back.
And it smells like Victory.
This episode is brought to you by Factor.
Optimize your nutrition this year with Factor, America's number one ready -to -eat meal service.
Factor's fresh, never frozen meals are dietitian approved, ready -to -eat in just two minutes.
Choose from 40 weekly options across eight dietary preferences, like Calorie Smart, Protein Plus, and Keto.
Eat smarter at factormeals .com slash listen50.
And use code listen50 for 50 % off, plus free shipping on your first box.
factormeals .com slash listen50.
Code listen50. Tease and Seize apply.
Those men become known as the Cayuse Five.
Their trial in Oregon City is a spectacle.
There's little doubt that they'll be found guilty, though their lawyers do put up a solid defense.
They said that the killing occurred on Cayuse land, which was not part of the United States, with no rule of law other than the traditional law of the Cayuse.
And the traditional law of the Cayuse justified the killing of medicine men.
They had done it many times, Marcus Whitman was aware of this.
The judge considered that and just threw it out.
This could have been for a number of reasons.
For one thing, it wasn't just Marcus Whitman who was killed.
It was also his wife and 10 other men.
But perhaps even more importantly, the idea that the Cayuse control their land and determine its laws, these white settlers aren't having it.
The Cayuse Five are found guilty of murder and publicly hanged.
To choke them to death means that their spirit will be held in their body and it won't be allowed to pass to the other land to the other side across the vale, across the river to where our ancestors are.
So the worst way to kill them is how they kill them by hanging.
Meanwhile, news of the massacre and the ensuing violence has gotten back to the federal government.
The settlers in Oregon sent a delegation back to Washington.
And this delegation persuaded President Polk to turn the Oregon country, which was sort of this amorphous mass, it had no particular status, into an official territory of the United States.
Circumstances for the Native Americans and settlers in Oregon change quickly.
Polk dispatched the US Calvary, federal judges, and a territorial governor.
to begin the process of turning the Oregon country into the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
Without the Whitman's deaths, Blain -Harden says, who knows when the U .S. would have incorporated this region into the country.
What Whitman and his wife really did, more than anything else, the result of their missionary endeavors, is they got themselves killed and their death was a trigger for motivating the President of the United States and the Congress to turn the Oregon country into a legal part of the United States.
And it created a continental nation." The Oregon Territory is kind of the last puzzle piece.
If you look at a map, this gives America control over the 48 contiguous states it retains today.
Over the coming years, tens of thousands of settlers will cross the Oregon Trail in search of land and wealth.
And Marcus Whitman will reach the status of a martyr, largely due to the efforts of one man, Henry Spalding, the annoying missionary who had once proposed to Narcissa Whitman.
Spalding's life at this point is in disarray.
He's unemployed, bitter, and desperate for relevance and power.
And in the years after the Whitman killings, he spreads a story that is just a lie.
Spalding spun the story that the missionaries were killed because they had thwarted this Indian Catholic British plot.
Right, in Spalding's story of Whitman's death, the British are involved, the Catholics … there's a lot of anti -Catholic sentiment at the time in the United States.
Spalding is essentially making up a conspiracy theory, one that has himself and his wife and the Whitman's as star heroic characters.
In his version, Whitman saves Oregon from being stolen by the Brits, then, tragically, he's killed by the Cayuse.
He did not explain about the measles epidemic or about the years of bad blood between the of Nikaias, or about the fear of these people of thousands of white people taking their land.
He turned it around and made it into an almost Christ -like event where Whitman gave his blood so that Oregon, Washington, and Idaho could become a part of the United States.
This story appears in newspapers across the country.
It's a perfect anecdote to reinforce all of the ideas around manifest destiny.
Spalding goes to Washington and has Congress introduce his version of events into the record. It became the, really the essence of every history book on the Pacific Northwest. Blaine Harden himself grew up in the Pacific Northwest. So he definitely heard of Marcus Whitman, the martyr.
In elementary school, his class performed the story in a play.
Not the death part — that was too grisly — but the story of Whitman the hero, who saved the Pacific Northwest from the British, and as a missionary who helped the Cayuse learn to read and to grind wheat for bread.
The real story, as you just heard, is a lot more complicated than that.
I mean, this killing was a terrible thing.
There's no way around it.
It was brutal, it was unjustified, but it was also understandable.
This time still echoes loudly in tribal memory.
It's a widespread sense of injustice in our community.
It's a widespread sense of tragedy.
A tragedy in which many people, not just the Whitman's, lost their lives.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
If you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweekathistory .com.
Special thanks to our guests Bobby Connor, Director of the Tomaslicht Cultural Institute, and Blaine Harden, former correspondent for The Washington Post and author of Murder at the Mission, a frontier killing, its legacy of lies and the taking of the American West. We also consulted another great book putting this episode together, Unsettled Ground, The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West by Cassandra Tate.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein.
It was also produced by me, Sally Helm.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.
From The History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fittler.
Don't forget to follow Rate and Review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.
