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

Journalist Harden (Escape from Camp 14) delivers a lively history of the 1847 Whitman Massacre in Oregon Territory, revealing how the killing of Presbyterian missionary Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and 11 other white settlers by Cayuse tribesmen accelerated the settlement of the Pacific Northwest. Harden places the missionaries who settled Oregon in the 1830s in the context of the Protestant evangelical fervor sweeping the country, and links the killings to a measles epidemic that wiped out nearly half of the Cayuse tribe at the same time that more whites were settling on their land. After the massacre, Whitman’s fellow missionary Henry Spalding propagated the “great American lie” that a few years before his death, Whitman had made a dramatic, cross-country horseback ride to Washington, D.C., to save the territory from a British takeover and push for the opening of the Oregon Trail (in reality, he had gone east to save his and Spalding’s jobs). Harden recounts how the myth was spread in newspapers, Sunday schools, and college textbooks, contributing to a century-long persecution of the Cayuse. Enriched by dramatic storytelling and candid interviews with contemporary Cayuses, this immersive account illuminates how the tragedies of the past inform the present. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (Apr.)