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So Mr. Warren sought investors. I wondered if he knew that
doing so would limit his control, shade his dreams a bit with different colors than what he had in mind. I didn’t say that as we sat beside the river. Instead, I tried to erase what he had taken as a slight on my part, questioning how he’d accomplish what he set out to do. Facts do little but annoy big dreamers, or make them more determined to show the naysayers wrong. And I found I didn’t want to distress him. I wanted to please him, to make him happy. “How many cows do you think you’d need to have?”

“Not milk cows, now. I’m talking beeves.”

I nodded, picked up a stitch I’d dropped.

“’Course I’d let you have some milkers, for the little ones and all.”

I blinked. “Was that a marriage proposal, Mr. Warren?”

“Kind of.” He had a charming grin, the ease of it bringing a shiver to my belly. He plopped another stone into a quiet eddy of the stream. I watched it ripple outward. He reached for my hands. “They’re cold.”

“I’m fourteen, won’t be fifteen until November,” I reminded him. “My father would never approve. I’ve schooling to attend to. My father intends for me to return to the Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove.”

“You’re smart. You should do that, I suppose, but you can learn from places other than books.” He kissed my knuckles. “I wonder if he’ll let you. You do a lot for him.”

“As long as I have books to read, I’m always learning.” I pulled my hands from his. I dropped another stitch I had to go back for. Would my father let me marry, ever? “I can take care of my siblings. No, marriage to you is quite out of the question. I’m responsible for my brother and sisters. I’m the oldest. It’s what my mother would want.”

“Bring the little ones with you. I like that toothless Martha.”

“Her front teeth are in.”

“And Amelia is a minx. She’s game for anything. Got me to give her a ride on my horse last week and hand over the reins to her. What is she, five?”

“She’s six. She’ll say ‘six and a half.’ And yes, she does sometimes take a risk or two and is pretty certain of herself.”

“Runs in the family, does it?”

I’m not a
risk taker.
“With horses. She’s very good with horses.”

“Not unlike her big sister.” He leaned toward me then and I thought he might kiss me.

He did.

The crochet hook dropped into my lap. “I’m fourteen.” I swallowed what I was going to say next.

“I know,” he whispered. “And tall. And beautiful.” His voice was gravely low. “And kind.” He kissed me again, hands warm against the back of my head. I hoped my twisted braid would stay atop it. “And the smartest girl I’ve ever known.”

I might not have allowed the final kiss of that afternoon if he hadn’t added that last. I don’t know why, but it mattered to me that he saw competence. Perhaps because I struggled so with seeing it in myself. I’d made mistakes. Like at Waiilatpu. I hadn’t listened to my mother’s pleas to keep me home that year. I knew my father wanted me to go to the Whitmans’ school at Waiilatpu and I wanted to be with other children, away from my brother and sisters for a time. I wanted the new adventure too, of being in a new place, to hear new stories. So I’d sassed my mother, who only longed to keep me home with her to continue teaching me herself. She could have schooled a toad to give up its hopping if she’d set her mind to it. Brilliant, people said of her teaching. I told her we should do what Father wanted. He was head of the house, after all.

“‘And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient . . .’ Second Timothy 2:24,” my mother had quoted. “This means one must not be quarrelsome, Eliza. But always kind, to everyone, be open to learning new things, and allow God to whisk away resentment as I hear in your voice.” I shamed myself with her calm reminder that my tongue could get me into trouble.

Because of my selfishness that day, my desire to resist the higher order that my mother wanted for me, I’d ended up in tragedy, unable to stop it, fearing for my life, my parents’ lives, wondering if I’d ever see them or my brother and sisters again. I’d erred. Made many, many mistakes that I carried in my basket of shame. But only briefly did I wonder if sitting there kissing Mr. Warren was one of them.

I clung to him, felt the safety of his arms around me, having missed the touch or warmth of caring. The smell of his sweaty collarless shirt comforted, and his words held the hope that I could choose wisely. My heart pounded and I felt tingles in my bodice pressed against him. “One of the smartest people” he’d ever known, he’d said. And what fourteen-year-old ever considers that a boy twenty probably hasn’t met many people at all, let alone so many that one young girl stood out in his field of intelligent people who had crossed his path. For all I know, I was likely the only fourteen-year-old girl he’d ever spent a moment with, let alone kissed.

The crochet hooks poked against me. “We’d better go.” I pushed him back with gentle force.

“You didn’t answer.” He traced my cheekbones with his thumb.

“When you make a proper proposal, Mr. Warren, I will consider it. For now, I will cherish your dream with you. And pray that God will guide you to that place where all good things come from him, not only from your sound efforts.”

He pulled back. “You preachin’ like your pa?”

“I’m telling you what I believe, what moves me. Not just your warm kisses, Mr. Warren, but your heart must woo me. And I must know your heart seeks Jesus.” I didn’t know why I threw that condition in. Maybe to placate my father when that time came, or in memory of my mother who was so faithful. “My mother knew her path was set by the Lord Almighty and that was how she endured the trials she did, and she and my father were faithful to each other and their work. She changed a hundred lives with her commitment, her kindnesses, her—”

“I get it. Your mama was a saint. Oh, I ain’t mocking, I’m not.” He held his hands up to ward off my scowl. “She was. Everyone says so. Even my pa, and his kind words are stingy as mosquitoes in December.” He rose, pulled me up to him, our bodies pressed together as close as iron to apron. “I have to think on how I feel about what you’re talkin’ on.” He thumbed my cheek, sending shivers. “Jesus and what-not. That’s needed before you’d consider hitching up to my yoke?”

“It will never be a yoke, Mr. Warren, if the Lord chooses it. We’ll team up together, yes, but I’ll not wear a heavy collar saying I must always go just your way whenever you choose.”

“I’ll be ponderin’ then, Miss Spalding.”

I’d given Mr. Warren words to consider. My mother would be proud. I knew what was important in a marriage. I knew what was the center. But I harbored a terrible fear that perhaps Mr. Warren might not come to choose the faith, and what then for us? He rode off. I touched my fingers to my lips so recently caressed and wondered if I would be strong enough to resist the warmth his kisses promised, whether he met my conditions or not.

The Diary of Eliza Spalding

1850

I have often wondered what is important in a marriage, besides a shared faith, how two separate people somehow come together for a purpose beyond themselves; and then see it fractured and believe they’ve contributed to the problems but not how, nor how to stop it. I’ve no answers. So I’ve taken to poring over old notes, translations, lessons, and letters while Mr. S and Eliza are gone to the trial. I write then in this journal hoping I can find some understanding as to what happened, why it happened.

This morning, I watched my twelve-year-old daughter’s slender body walk away from me, again. She wore my old cape instead of her own. We hadn’t been allowed to take much with us when we escaped, and funds to replace things have come as slow as high country spring. Her bonnet hid her face, but I knew, as a mother does, that she stared with eyes focused on the past. She turned. A painful, pleading look; me, powerless to stop it.

Earlier, my husband and I quivered inside the space of silence as when a walker comes upon a mountain lion, wondering if in that moment destruction would slice the gap or if each would honor peace and allow the other to go along its path. I asked him not to take her, that she was so young and still shaking from that dreadful November day. What I did not realize then was that we all still shook from it, from the powerlessness and wondering why our work had failed in such a way that God had turned his back on so many. These would not be words I could say to my husband, but then I often struggled to find the words to express myself to him. Even before the great tragedy at Waiilatpu.

“I have need of her here.” That’s what I’d told him, of my need. But truly, I believed it was God’s need to protect her yet again. God as the center. That’s what I so wanted Eliza to understand, to experience. Instead, it was her father’s passion for justice or perhaps revenge that drove him to take her with him to Oregon City.

We’d adjusted to yet another landscape, our little family. This one in the Willamette Valley of the Oregon Territory far from the land I’d come to love, which we called Lapwai and the natives described as “the place of the butterflies.” From the mighty rivers of the Snake and Clearwater and the stark, round hills rising like the humped backs of sleeping bulls we moved—escaped—to the Tualatin Plain where tall timber closed in the sky and where I hadn’t heard a word of Sahaptin, the Nez Perce language, now for nearly three years. I miss the Nimíipuu people, the language, the work, my life 350 miles away.

I’d pleaded with my husband this morning, using the same words as when he sent Eliza to the school when she was nine. That my husband would insist my child leave (and be a part of that Narcissa Whitman’s life! Forgive my sin of jealousy, Lord, especially when I live and Narcissa does not) and then not even take her to school himself because he was too busy doing the Lord’s work? Is not tending our children also the Lord’s work? I must not dwell there. I will think of better things.

Matilda, our Nimíipuu helper, took my child, the two riding on separate horses the 120 miles to Waiilatpu where Eliza was to remain until the spring. My daughter left a happy child. She celebrated her 10th birthday at Waiilatpu, away from us, among the Cayuse and with the Whitmans. I’d failed in my efforts to keep her home with me then, though some would say I was obedient to my husband, which is of greater import. I’m not certain of that. Standing for a child is of the highest order to my thinking. Now, after all our chaos and moving and moving again, he wishes to attend the trial, insisting that Eliza is the greatest witness, that his Eliza spoke the language, interpreted for the hostages, so of course she would testify, as she must to secure justice. I wonder if having her repeat the trauma expresses the mercy our Lord commanded. The Cayuse responsible are captured; there were other hostages freed, older, to testify. A twelve-year-old child has seen enough and I believe repeats the events in her nightmares. She does not need to see the accused nor hear again the agonies of those terrible days.

I wanted Mr. S to let her stay with me, help with her younger brother and sisters, be a child again, to walk beside me in the forests that we might discover together this new landscape. When I would be well enough to walk again. But in the silence, that pause of walker meeting mountain lion, I knew that I had lost. I watched his face turn red, his fists tighten. He would take her, and my resistance to him would falter as it always did. Well, not always. I did once insist she learn the Nez Perce language as I did, and in the end, that may have saved her. Saved us all. No, the Lord saved us. Even in this diary I must acknowledge that. But I did teach her the language, didn’t I? I played some small part in my child’s survival, didn’t I? I am shamed for not standing up and insisting she remain at home, with me. I didn’t stand that day; I let her go to Waiilatpu. One often never knows if what one stands for will in the end be for naught or be the bridge that gives a child a way to go forward.

She mounts her horse, takes the reins. She looks back once and I see a small hand raised, waving.

Forgive me, Lord, my own rambling. It will never be the same for any of us. Especially not for Eliza. Pray help me accept. Help me accept what I do not understand.

3
The River’s Edge

Many things about my behavior I do not understand. My meetings with Mr. Warren, for example. By the spring of 1853 I’d been breathless with him, often, seated beside the Calapooia, at some risk. We’d catch each other on the way to Brown and Blakely’s or while riding to the Osborne farm. He’d come upon me as planned in the moist heat of blackberries ripening in July. He’d put his arm around me at the graveyard, comforting, my mother having been joined by another settler that year. The iris bloomed. I missed her so! Nothing would be the same with her gone, I knew that, but I kept imagining her with me, wondering what she’d say about Mr. Warren.

I had been too young for my mother to talk to me of love between men and women. Only on that journey to school the fall before the killings did I gain some small insight into marital love. That wouldn’t have happened if my father hadn’t insisted I go to school, overruling my mother. Then at the last minute
he gave Matilda, a Nez Perce woman, a list of supplies to bring back and directed her to take me to the Whitmans at Waiilatpu. I adored the five-day journey with Matilda. I was nine years old, almost ten. At first I felt abandoned by my father for not riding with me. I also felt incomplete without my brother along; but after what happened, I was grateful he had not been sent to school with me and wasn’t there to spoil my time alone with Matilda either.