Original subtitles

What would cause you to leave your family and your home

and travel to a place where almost no one speaks your language?

No one looks like you.

Your customs are foreign, and where if you get in trouble,

no one you know is around to help.

For many, what drove them west was the promise of land.

For a few, it was their faith,

and that's what moved Christian missionaries

Narcissa and Marcus Whitman to travel across the continent.

Their journey along the Oregon Trail will inspire thousands to follow,

and spark a fateful encounter with a Native nation

that redefines the Pacific Northwest.

People live on myths,

and the myths that really stick in the American experience

are the myths of the West.

The mountains were taller, the deserts were harsher.

The snows were deeper.

American West conjures wonder, possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws.

The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

But this is a clash of two different ways

of seeing life itself,

fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side...

...and fighting for the destiny of the new republic on the other side.

The history of the West is a creation story.

It's a creation of what we think of as modern America.

The West is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American dream.

The core of this is, what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The West is this canvas on which American dreams

become larger than life.

The year is 1836,

the final year of Andrew Jackson's presidency.

The US now has 24 states

and four territories stretching across the Mississippi River.

But the Americans have their eyes on the Pacific coast.

California is part of Mexico, but Oregon Country is up for grabs.

Settlement had been continuous from the Virginia coastline,

the Massachusetts coastline, even across the Mississippi.

Then you run into this arid region...

...from the edge of the Great Plains

till you get to the rainy side of the mountains in Oregon.

And so in the 1830s,

the settlement has to make this big jump if you're gonna-

if you're farmers looking for land.

This is the green place beyond the great American desert

where if you can just get there,

there's a possibility of a life ahead.

Oregon Country stretches from the Continental Divide

to the Pacific coast,

and from the northern edge of California all the way up to Alaska.

Britain and America both lay claim to the region

simply for having explored it.

In 1792, fur trader Robert Gray was the first American to navigate

into the Columbia River, which he named after his ship.

Britain traces its claim to the voyage of Captain James Cook,

who sailed to Vancouver in 1778,

but after the two nations clash in the War of 1812,

neither side wants to fight again.

And so in 1818,

they agree to jointly occupy the Pacific Northwest.

The British have a much bigger settlement imprint

on the West Coast.

The Hudson Bay Company was one of these Canadian fur companies

that has a fairly elaborate infrastructure

in the Oregon Country. The US doesn't have much at all.

There was this national incentive

to put Americans on the ground there.

If the place fills up with Americans,

then the United States is gonna have a better claim than the British.

The first men to arrive in Oregon Country are explorers,

trappers, and traders.

They send back stories of fertile lands, rich in natural resources.

You could get land cheap in the West,

and you could get land in Oregon free.

You could just go out there and claim it,

because Americans at that time did not recognise

that the Native American peoples living on any territory

had title to the land.

The expansive land that was known to our people

was millions of acres from the source of the Columbia River

in British Columbia to the ocean.

We're the only people in that landscape

who have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

For Americans,

the most direct route to the Pacific Coast is an arduous journey

over land across two mountain ranges.

Few have the courage to make the trip.

But then the missionaries begin to arrive.

There's a series of events toward the end of the first third

of the 19th century. It's called the Second Great Awakening.

It's the revival of evangelical Christianity,

a belief in the literal veracity of the gospels and the Bible,

but also a call to bring others to the Christian faith.

It really inflames a lot of individuals,

and you're excited to take all of this fervour, all this fire,

all this passion, and disseminate the word into foreign lands,

and at that particular time,

foreign land was anything west of the Mississippi.

The whole idea is to convert the Indians.

Now, if in fact they also facilitate the settlement of Oregon

by other white people, I mean that's good too.

Missionaries are hearing a story that, to them,

is so delicious.

They hear that four Indians from the Pacific Northwest

travelled to St. Louis to get more information about Christianity.

If somebody says, "Bring the gospel to us,"

how, as a good evangelical Christian, how can you say no?

We weren't looking for a different God.

We were looking for the source of the white men's power

that allowed them to have these technologies that we did not have,

their guns and their metal kettles and their steel traps, you name it.

The Christians mistakenly believe that the Native visitors

speak for all Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest.

The call to mission sounds out across the eastern states.

For Narcissa Prentiss, a young woman in upstate New York,

it strikes a chord.

She leads revivals, she teaches Sunday school,

and so she becomes very dedicated to the idea

that a missionary vocation is really the right thing for her.

She writes a letter

requesting support from the church mission board.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

would gather money to support Protestant missions

to spread the gospel abroad,

but also in the American West, on the frontier.

In 1836, women had so few rights in America.

They could not own property if they were married.

They could not write a legal contract,

and the most important thing is they could not vote,

which meant that they couldn't change their lot in life.

This is why it's so incredible that Narcissa, as a single woman,

was planning to go by herself over to Oregon.

The missionary board tells Narcissa they will not send a woman

into Indian country unless she is married.

Marcus Whitman is a 32-year-old doctor in upstate New York.

He is an evangelical Christian.

But he's bored by being a doctor. There's no excitement in it.

He applies to the American Missionary Board,

and they're not too keen on sending him out as a single man.

And so they encourage him to get married,

and he finds a suitable candidate in the figure of Narcissa Prentiss.

You need a husband, I need a wife.

And so they get together, they get married,

and then they present themselves to the Mission Board.

And the Mission Board at this point can't say no.

It's a 3,000 mile journey to Oregon Country.

The day after their wedding,

Marcus and Narcissa leave the comfort and safety

of western New York, and travel to Liberty, Missouri,

a town on the western edge of American settlement.

They had to go by horse and wagon,

and then they had to go by canal barges,

move sometimes on sleighs,

and then when the horse and wagon didn't work, they'd have to walk.

They're subject to the heat and the rain and the snow.

It's incomprehensible.

Narcissa kept a journal of her travels.

I think I shall endure the journey well,

perhaps better than any of the rest of us.

It seems to me now that we are on the very borders of civilization.

They go with another couple,

Reverend Henry Spalding and his wife Eliza.

It's a seven-month journey.

In the early 1830s, there really wasn't much of a trail to Oregon.

It was a trapper's trail. You couldn't get a wagon over it.

And so it was really a tough, tough journey.

Marcus Whitman recognises that the only way

that Christian civilization as he perceives it

is gonna be planted in Oregon is, and this is crucial,

when you can get women to come out,

because if it's just the fur traders,

if it's just the explorers, they don't create a settled society.

So Marcus Whitman gets it in his head,

he is going to find a wagon road.

The wagon was considered crucial,

because a wagon was the moving van of its era.

Just imagine how difficult it would be to go to Oregon in a cart.

But if this delicate example of American female virtue

could do it, I guess the door's open.

So the people who become missionaries, first of all,

they're utterly convinced of the importance

of what it is they're doing.

So this can give them courage to do things that most people don't do,

because with this mindset,

when you encounter some dangerous situation,

say, what's the worst that can happen to me?

I'll get killed. I'll die and go to heaven.

Travelling along traditional Native trails,

missionaries Narcissa and Marcus Whitman slowly traverse

the Great Plains on their way to Oregon Country.

Narcissa's view of what was in store for her

was really very idyllic.

She didn't imagine travelling by wagon.

There's no shocks, and you are jostled from pillar to post.

It can be hot, it can be cold, it can be raining,

it can be thundering, it can be lightning.

You can be smashing through ruts, over rocks, over stumps.

It goes on and on and on.

Since we have been here, we have made our tent large enough

for us all to sleep under, quite a little family.

One of the great ironies is that Marcus and Narcissa Whitman

travel west,

along with Henry Spalding,

a man Narcissa had rejected in a proposal of marriage,

and he's sleeping in the same tent with the Whitmans

on their honeymoon, a time when they conceived their only child.

Pregnancy on that trip was one of the most dangerous things

that could happen to you.

There's no stopping for you if you have morning sickness.

There's no stopping for you if you have a miscarriage.

And so that's the kind of thing that creates extra pressures

for women on these long, long migrations.

The Whitmans and the Spaldings cross the Rocky Mountains

by way of the South Pass,

a route favoured by the Shoshone people.

In July of 1836,

Narcissa and Eliza become the first American women

to make this journey over the Continental Divide.

As they travel west, they meet for a rendezvous

in what is now Wyoming. It's South Pass in the Rockies.

Once a year, miles from the edge of American settlement,

a temporary city springs up,

populated by French, British and American fur trappers and traders,

and hundreds of Native Americans from across the plains.

These rendezvous are where all these independent fur trappers

show up. You know, drinking, gambling, fighting,

the whole thing.

You can imagine with some missionaries showing up

at a rendezvous,

their mouths must have dropped in utter shock to see what went on.

At the rendezvous,

Narcissa befriends a legendary mountain man named Joe Meek.

Mountain men like Joe Meek could help tell the Whitmans

where to go, how to get there, give them local knowledge.

And so the mountain men became a very important link

between the tribes and the settlers who came.

As they approach Oregon Country,

the missionaries find their path is more treacherous than ever.

Before noon, we began to descend one of the most terrible mountains

for steepness and length I have yet seen.

It was like winding stairs in its descent, and in some places,

almost perpendicular.

Once they reach the Blue Mountains

in Oregon Country,

they are forced to abandon their wagons and continue on horseback.

And finally, after almost 200 days on the road,

they get their first glimpse of what will be their new home.

They're exhausted, they're running low on provisions,

and they come over the crest of the last mountain range,

and they look down and they have this great sense of relief.

We've made it.

It must have been absolutely amazing

after such an arduous journey,

and realising that this is where you're gonna have your baby,

and you're thinking to yourself,

"I've come to bring the light of true religion,

and the sun will shine on my efforts."

And you might not be right.

In the fall of 1836,

Marcus and Narcissa settle in the foothills

of the Blue Mountains near Walla Walla.

Henry Spalding squabbles almost the entire trip with Marcus Whitman.

And when they arrive in the Pacific Northwest,

they really can't stand each other,

and they decide to live 120 miles apart.

The Spaldings settle among the Nez Perce in the Lapwai Valley.

Meanwhile, Narcissa and Marcus make their home near the Cayuse,

four days away by horseback.

The Nez Perce warn the white missionaries

that it's probably dangerous to live among the Cayuse.

For one thing, it's very dangerous for a doctor,

'cause the Cayuse have this longstanding tradition

of killing medicine men who fail.

For the Cayuse, like many Native peoples,

medicine man is a sacred practice.

When you can't deliver results, the Cayuse demand justice...

...and the penalty for that is death.

Despite the warnings they receive about the Cayuse,

the Whitmans embrace their missionary work.

Marcus builds the mission with several hired hands

from the Hudson's Bay Company.

They call it Waiilatpu,

in the Cayuse language, the place of the rye grass.

Funded by the missionary board in the East,

it will include a mission house, a school, and a farm.

Narcissa gives birth to her daughter Alice in March of 1837...

...just about five, six months after they set up housekeeping

at their mission.

Narcissa is thrilled when she welcomes her little girl

into the world, and so is Marcus.

Now we have a child born in the Promised Land.

At the mission in the early days,

the Whitmans have good relations with the Cayuse.

The local chief, or head man, his name is Tiloukaikt,

is seen as a benevolent, a sort of a kind uncle.

He comes to see little Alice, and in general,

the reception for the whole family is very hopeful.

Tiloukaikt gave her an Indian name,

called her Cayuse Girl.

That's how it translated.

And he calls her that because she is a sign to us

that we will have good times ahead, good fortune ahead.

We have young children, they have young children,

and it is a family now.

Unlike the fur trappers who came before them,

the Whitmans want to change the way the Cayuse live

and what they believe.

So for Indigenous people,

Christianity wasn't necessarily a threat initially,

because it's like, oh, the Great Spirit,

well, that kind of makes sense, and we'll incorporate that

into our belief systems until it doesn't work for us anymore.

When the Whitmans arrive,

they think their ways have to be followed

before the Native Americans can be saved.

So that involves settling down, becoming farmers,

cutting their hair, stop dancing, stop gambling.

They want us to give up the way of life that has sustained us

for more than 10,000 years.

The expectation is that we should be as much like them as possible

in all factors of our life.

We should be prim and proper.

We should not...

...travel to gather our foods.

We should stay in one place and grow our foods.

We should not take up with the trappers and traders

in the way that we have,

and everything they want us to change is not in our nature.

Life at the mission settles into a routine of work and worship,

until one day, tragedy strikes.

The worst possible thing happens

when Alice is not quite three years old.

Marcus and Narcissa don't notice that their daughter

has wandered away.

So Alice is on her own,

and she's playing at the water...

...before anybody realises that they haven't seen her for a few minutes.

And the alarm is raised that Alice is missing,

and everyone begins to look for her.

And that's when they find that she has drowned

in the Walla Walla River.

The body is recovered and it's brought back to the family.

Tiloukaikt has known her since she was born.

She's special to him,

and he's very sad to present this little girl to her mother.

The loss of her daughter changes her.

Her moroseness characterises her relationship

more and more with our people.

Narcissa becomes very annoyed with the fact that the Cayuse

come and go from the compound, come and go out of her home

when she was despondent and would rather just be to herself

and deal with her grief.

To make matters worse,

the Whitmans are failing to convert the Cayuse.

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman only manage to baptise two people

in the entire time that they are running this mission.

Two.

Meanwhile, the Spaldings are having more success

with the Nez Perce.

The competition between Henry and Marcus sours into a bitter rivalry.

They don't like each other, they're jealous.

They write tattling letters back to the board in Boston.

And these letters, there are hundreds of these letters,

in fact, most of them tattling on each other.

They're behaving in a most un-Christian, un-adult kind of way.

And so the board finally decides, we're gonna pull the plug.

But Marcus refuses to accept the mission board's decision.

With winter fast approaching,

he leaves Narcissa in October of 1842,

and begins the 3,000 mile journey back east

to plead his case in person.

Setting out from Oregon Country,

late in the fall of 1842,

missionary Marcus Whitman makes his way east across the continent.

At the end of a harrowing six-month journey,

he arrives in Boston in threadbare clothes

and throws himself on the mercy of the Mission Board.

They give him one last chance.

Whitman returns from Boston by way of St. Louis,

and in St. Louis, there is a large wagon train formed.

He didn't organise it, but he ends up becoming its defacto head man.

He shows them that wagons can, in fact, cross the Rockies

and several hundred American settlers come.

It opens the way for almost exponential growth.

Seven years have passed since Marcus first set off

for Oregon Country.

This time he is one of the many making the trek.

In 1843,

more than a thousand Americans are bound for Oregon Country.

Economic conditions in the East are driving more and more

Americans into the West.

There's a financial panic in 1837

that throws a lot of people out of work, and people in the East,

for whom life wasn't going so well,

they always thought they could start over again in the West.

Much has changed since the Whitman's first trip.

Back then, Marcus had been forced to abandon his wagon

when the trail became too rocky and narrow.

But the trail has been widened and extended by Narcissa's friend

from the rendezvous, mountain man Joe Meek.

Now wagon trains can make their way over the Blue Mountains

past the Whitman mission,

and further west toward the Pacific Coast.

Joe Meek's path becomes the last leg of the legendary Oregon Trail.

Most of these Americans who head west are utterly clueless

about how big this continent is,

and utterly shocked when they get out there.

There are people who are trying to carry their furniture,

and eventually,

the Oregon Trail becomes littered with dining room sets,

and pianos, and rocking chairs,

and all sorts of things that these eastern settlers

think they're gonna take with them on this westward journey.

They encounter great difficulties,

but they're gonna get there no matter what.

When families go west,

then you know that the western settlement is serious.

In late September 1843,

Marcus returns to Oregon Country.

After more than a year apart,

Narcissa and her husband are reunited.

The Great Migration gives them a new purpose.

Turning their attention away from the Cayuse,

they focus on supporting new migrants

who stop off at the mission on their way to the fertile lands

of the Willamette Valley to the west.

Often when settlers travelled west, they lost family members,

parents died, and children were left orphans,

and the Whitmans took them in.

Narcissa Whitman recognises she's not gonna be converting

Native people, and so she says,

"I realise that I have to focus my efforts on trying to bring

the light of the true religion to the white people around me.

The influx of migrants strengthens the America's hold

on the Pacific coast.

Although it is still jointly occupied with Great Britain,

Oregon figures more and more into America's dreams for the future,

and becomes a key part of James Polk's campaign

for president in 1844.

So James Polk runs for president on an overtly expansionist ticket,

and he says, "We're gonna claim all of Oregon."

After Polk is elected,

Great Britain gives into pressure by the US and signs a treaty in 1846,

dividing Oregon Country between them at the 49th parallel.

Great Britain understood that the sheer juggernaut

of American intention, and willpower, and manpower,

and economic power

was going to make it impossible for them really to maintain

any claims to Oregon without a war,

and they didn't want to fight that war.

The treaty gives the British everything north

of the 49th parallel,

plus the island of Vancouver,

while the US gets the southern part of Oregon Country,

gaining 18.5 million acres of new land

and their first piece of the Pacific coast.

But the American part of Oregon remains unorganised

with no federal presence and no formal government.

In the case of Oregon, the settlers went ahead of government,

and then government came along afterwards.

And so more people come the next year,

and more people come the year after that.

And so the Oregon Trail then becomes the highway to Oregon.

The numbers go from like 250 one year,

to 1,000 one year, to 4,000 the next year, to 7,000.

They're starting to outnumber the Indigenous people of the region

very quickly,

and the Cayuse see the transformation,

and they don't like it.

Among the many newcomers at the Whitman mission in 1847

is a man named Joe Lewis.

He is of mixed blood, part French Canadian, part Native.

He brings a stark warning for the Cayuse.

Around the country, Native people have lost their lands.

They have been wiped out. They have been killed off.

Over the previous decade and a half,

around a hundred thousand American Indians

east of the Mississippi have been forcibly displaced

under President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act.

American settlers have taken their lands for themselves.

This news from Joe Lewis alarms the Cayuse.

With Oregon now controlled by the United States,

they fear that settlers will soon take their land.

Then in the fall of 1847,

an outbreak of measles tears through the Pacific Northwest.

White settlers contract the virus,

but many of them have natural resistance.

The Cayuse and other Native Americans do not.

Our ways of healing are not working.

Dr Whitman's are not working when they're burying two,

four, and six people a day.

Whitman didn't understand how measles worked.

His favourite prescription was to bleed people who were sick,

which made them sicker.

He didn't really know what else to do.

Eventually disease will kill nearly half the Cayuse,

hitting their children hardest of all.

Marcus Whitman is not able to save our people.

He's warned many times.

Among the Cayuse, if you practice bad medicine,

you could pay with your life.

In November of 1847,

Marcus Whitman fires Joe Lewis from the mission

where he'd been employed as a labourer.

Lewis starts to spread a pernicious rumour

that the Whitmans are poisoning the Cayuse so they can steal their land.

If you're one of the Indians, you're thinking,

"Boy, not only are they affronting our beliefs,

but they're killing us."

Friendly Cayuse warn Marcus that his life is now in danger.

But for reasons having to do with the stubborn nature

of Marcus Whitman and his sense of destiny,

Whitman will not leave.

On November 29th, 1847, it all comes to a head.

That morning there was a funeral for three Cayuse children,

all victims of measles.

Among the dead children is the son of the local leader Tiloukaikt.

It is his third child to die from the measles.

After the funeral,

Marcus and Narcissa receive some visitors at the mission.

More than a dozen Cayuse men gather outside their door.

He admits two or three Cayuse warriors,

including Tiloukaikt and another warrior named Tomahas

to this mission house.

I'm sure he sensed something was amiss...

...and so he helps to get Narcissa out of there with the child.

They engage him in conversation.

And they are there asking Dr Whitman about medicine.

And what they wanted to show was that he had poisons

in his medicines.

And according to witnesses,

Tomahas hits Whitman in the back of the head with a tomahawk...

...knocking him to the ground and cracking his skull.

He's then shot in the neck.

Narcissa goes to the window to look out and see what's happening...

...and she's shot in the shoulder.

The Cayuse are not going to abandon their mission

to get rid of the Whitmans.

They're able to get Mrs Whitman on a settee

and carry it out.

Joe Lewis is one of the carriers of that piece of furniture.

She's thrown off the settee that she was carried out on into the mud.

She's shot, she's hacked, she's whipped,

and she dies in the mud.

When our young men decided that the Whitmans' lives should end...

...they didn't realise it would bring down on us thunder from the east

that we could not have imagined.

After killing the Whitmans, the Cayuse continue their slaughter,

killing 11 more white settlers who are living at the mission.

When word of the massacre reaches the Willamette Valley,

it causes rage and a desire for vengeance.

The white people create a militia to go to war.

The settlers want protection

from the federal government,

and they send Joe Meek to Washington to ask for it.

Meek makes the case that in order to defend the lives

of American citizens,

the Oregon Country needs to become a US territory.

In August of 1848,

Oregon officially becomes a territory of the United States.

600 federal riflemen are sent west to hunt for the killers.

They send out a governor, they send out the military.

It's open season on Indians in the Oregon Territory.

The ensuing conflict will come to be known as the Cayuse War.

The Native side suffers devastating losses.

Finally, after two years, in April of 1850,

five men turn themselves in to stop the bloodshed.

Joe Lewis is not among these volunteers, but Tiloukaikt is.

They make statements, depositions, and Tiloukaikt says,

"Did not Christ die to save his people?

So I die. We die to save our people."

The so-called Cayuse Five are transported to Oregon City

and hastily tried for murder in a tavern.

A jury of white settlers hands down a guilty verdict

and a death sentence.

Maybe half of all the white people in the Willamette Valley

come to watch it.

The five men who were hanged in Oregon City...

...we're still looking for their graves,

because we'd like to bring them home.

In 1855,

just 50 years after first welcoming American explorers to the region,

the Cayuse are forced to sign a treaty.

The terms are harsh.

They must give up their vast homeland of over 6.4 million acres

and move onto a 245,000-acre reservation

shared with other tribes.

The lands they surrender are given to American settlers.

In 1859, Oregon becomes the 33rd state in the union.

Henry Spalding, after the death of his rival, Marcus Whitman,

becomes a one-man propaganda machine,

and he essentially invents the Whitman legend for American history.

Whitman is credited with getting the Oregon Country

for the United States.

Spalding sends articles to religious newspapers,

and eventually persuades the US Senate

to publish his account of Whitman's heroism,

elevating himself in the process.

And Marcus Whitman goes from being a failed anonymous guy

who got killed

to a Christ-like figure who sacrificed his blood

so Oregon could live.

The killing of the Whitmans fails to stop the flood

of immigrants to the rich farmlands of Oregon.

From the 1840s through the 1860s,

over 400,000 people travel west along the Oregon Trail.

It was the greatest folk migration in American history.

At some points, there were as many as 12 wagons abreast

going across this country.

So many people come to the Willamette Valley

that they actually carve a cut through the mountains

and across the prairies that can be seen still from satellites.

The epic migration continues by foot, by cart,

by mule, and by wagon

until the Transcontinental Railroad offers travellers a gentler way

to go west.

Oregon is changed forever.

Where the Cayuse once gathered food and hunted game

and where the mountain men once trapped animals for trade,

the varied landscape is now supplanted by settlements and farms.

And so there is a kind of transition from

an extraction economy of furs,

and now moving into an agrarian economy in the Pacific Northwest.

We accept that our homeland is

the homeland of many people now.

Our elders always tell us there's good and bad in everything

that happens. You have to look at both.

Of the thousand Americans that follow the Whitmans to Oregon,

few will see their deaths as anything other than a massacre.

But their story is emblematic of a pattern

that repeats across the American West,

settlers using Native resistance as an excuse to seize their homelands,

and just as they did in Oregon,

land-hungry settlers will push into Texas

and turn a raid on one pioneer family

into a long and bloody war,

fought against the most powerful Native force on the continent,

the Comanche Empire. Subtitles by Sky Access Services