them much."
This season of quiet was not to last. Late in the summer of the following year Mrs. Whitman writes of their situation in a less hopeful strain. It is on the eve of the passing of another caravan of immigrants, and she views their coming not without apprehension, for the Indians as well as for themselves.
"It is difficult to imagine what kind of a winter we shall have this winter, for it will not be possible for so many to all pass through the Cascades into the Willamette this fall, even if they should succeed in getting through the Blue mountains as far as here. . . . We are not likely to be as well off for provisions this season as usual — our crops are not abundant.
"Poor people, those that are not able to get on, or pay for what they need are those that will most likely wish to stop here, judging from the past. The poor Indians are amazed at the overwhelming numbers of Americans com- ing into the country. They seem not tO' know what to make of it. Very many of the principal ones are dying, and some have been killed by other Indians, in going south into the region of California. The remaining ones seem attached to us and cling to us the closer ;. cultivate their farms quite extensively, and do not wish to see any Sniapus (Americans) settle among them here; they are willing to have them spend the winter here, but in the spring they must all move on. They would be willing to have more missionaries stop and those devoted to their good. They expect that eventually this country will be settled by them, but they wish to see the Willamette filled up first."
The undertone of foreboding in this letter was not groundless. Whether Mrs. Whitman was conscious of it or not as she wrote, her letter describes a situation that boded ill for the mission. A proud tribe, accustomed in the past to dominate neighboring tribes, seeing its numbers decimated by war and by disease, and its lands each year more surely destined to pass into the hands of the white man — this was a situation that might easily, on further provocation, pass into one of bitter hostility and open revolt.
Dr. Whitman had felt this for some time, but without taking measures for protection. In a letter to her sister in the spring of 1847 Mrs. Whitman writes of her husband's absence for several weeks at Vancouver. This absence J. Quinn Thornton, in his history of the provisional government of Oregon ex- plains, in part at least. "In the spring of 1847," he writes, "Dr. Whitman being at my residence in Oregon City spoke to me freely on the subject of his mission station, and of the perils to which he feared all connected with it were exposed. And he said that he believed that nothing short of the establishment of a territorial government would save him and his mission from falling under the murderous hands of the savages. And he urged me to yield to the solicita- tions I had received to go at once to Washington city on behalf of the people and provisional government, for this and other purposes."
This was no imaginary peril. It was the forecast of a clearsighted, fearless man, one whose courage did not blind him to impending danger. The stroke fell sooner than he had expected, and with not less murderous effect. In the late summer and fall of this year an epidemic of measles prevailed among the Indians about the Whitman mission and among other tribes of the Columbia val- ley. Many of them died in spite of the utmost exertions of Dr. Whitman and his assistants. Dr. Whitman's very efforts to save the Indians only made his death at their hands more certain, such were their cruel superstitions regarding their medicine men or anyone in whose hands any of their number died. Then, too, the presence among them at that time of a vicious and disaffected person made it almost certain that this dreadful superstition would work disaster to the mis- sion.
So it did. On the morning of November 29, with no immediate warning the storm of savage passion broke with murderous effect on the devoted mission. Dr. Whitman himself fell first, then others until fourteen in all were slain — in- cluding Mrs. Whitman, the one woman among the victims, and fifty taken cap- tives, mostly women and c
