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My mother’s brother Horace, who had moved back East, returned with a wife and family. He carried with him letters my mother had sent to her sisters, last letters written in the weeks before her death.

“I thought you should have them.”

I thanked him, and when he and his family had bedded down in my empty house—all my children grown and gone—I read through them, startled by a few of her comments, comforted by others. While she had never said she loved me in her lifetime, she told her sisters that was so.

Beside my Lord and Mr. S, Eliza is my light. I hope she feels how much I love her. If I have time, I will write a letter to her but then I wonder what to say. She’s an intelligent young girl whose bright wit and kindness has been thwarted by the tragedy at the Whitman mission. I pray for her future, that one day God will restore her, make her blind to the horrors she witnessed and instead bring new sight to her weary eyes. May she cry tears of joy one day instead of sorrow. May she laugh beside the rivers of her life without wondering at her witness, her having survived. I pray for my dear Mr. S. He pushes at the rivers that God controls and doesn’t see that everything that happens can be converted into good. We simply do not know the good of it, our world being so vast and wide and us but a small part in it. Why were we chosen to come to the precious Nimíipuu? Why have we lived and the Whitmans did not? Why were we forced to leave the work of our hearts? Why has my husband taught and preached in this little Calapooia River place some call Brownsville? Is this to be his life? He seems angry here. I cannot bring him peace. These are questions without answers. I can live without the answers, but I’m not certain Mr. S can or my dear Eliza who I pray will not take on his impulsive ways. I pray Mr. S remarries soon, another teacher, someone to share his work and who will allow my dear Eliza to have the chance to be a child again, to laugh and cry in joy.

What does a child really know about their parents’ lives? What do my children think of their parents’ ways?

In 1888 I spoke at the Pioneer Reunion and I met up with Matilda Sager and Nancy Osborne and we told our stories just as I had one day imagined.

I reread my mother’s diaries and letters, liking especially the part about my becoming a child again, someone spontaneous who didn’t always regiment the days and hours and lives of those I loved.

Nearly twenty years later, in 1909, a new century, my son suggested a trip.

“We’re taking a visit, Mama, to Lake Chelan.” This, my son James speaking. He had moved with his family to Washington State some years before and invited me along. I was grateful they wanted an old lady tagging with them. I could still look after two little boys, and Wauna was an easygoing mother who worked hard and enjoyed her “easing time,” as she called putting her feet up on the leather hassock in an evening.

Chelan is a long, clear lake in Eastern Washington, rounded
at the edges like a knitted stocking. Something about the place appealed to me and I decided there and then to stay. My son tried only a little to talk me out of it. After all, I was seventy and, as he would say, a tease in his voice, “set in my ways.”

“Not so set I can’t build myself a little house.”

“I would never try to deter you, Mother. Just tell me how I can help.”

“When I’m ready, bring that woodstove out in your shed.”

“The one you made me haul from Brownsville? I can get you a new modern one, have it freighted in.”

“Your father gave that to me and I know just how much green wood and how much dry to get the temperature just right.”

“Whatever you say, Mother.” He kissed me on the top of my head the way I once did to him.

Out in the sagebrush I built my house. On my own, hammering the walls in place, asking for brawn to set the beams but finding delight doing most of it myself as though I were a child making my own little wagon wheels out of fir ends. A young bachelor helped me arrange to pull water from the lake into my kitchen with lead pipes. Imagine! I pump right into my tin-lined sink. I heat that water on my cookstove.

I didn’t try to arrange a marriage for him with one of my granddaughters. I’m past arranging the lives of others.

Sometimes I am asked to speak at pioneer picnics where we reminisce about our journeys west, north, and east. I praise the bachelors who always found time to ride hard for a doctor or raise a roof or build a chimney for someone else. And I praise the women, young and old, married and widowed, who make lives for themselves, some even doing as I did but much younger: file on a claim, build a home, and make a life there, living simply.

Nancy came to visit me once. She has lived through her husband’s dying. She married a second time the year my grandson
died of diphtheria. We were both already old, but she loved again and was willing to let another love her back.

“My Andrew is buried in a little Kees Cemetery we carved out of our property not all that far from Waiilatpu, near Weston.”

“Umatilla County now.”

“Yes. Pretty country.” I served her tea on my porch overlooking Lake Chelan. Gray laced her red hair; her freckles had faded. I noticed she left the cups alone, not moved to set them into a straight line. I commented on that.

“After my Andrew died, I sent the tortured thoughts away and vowed that if I loved again I would not waste time thinking of those events so far past. My second husband, William, tells me I am like a child with him, finding things to laugh about as much as I cry. I’ve buried that part of my life, Eliza. I no longer need to straighten everything out.”

After she left I sat on my little rocker and looking out over the lake, I decided I needed to go back to Lapwai, one more time.

I went by steamship, up the rivers. I arrived on a Sunday. Two women serve as missionaries there—Miss McBeth and her niece, Miss Crawford. How I admire their grit! The Indians seemed pleased to greet me, though they could not have ever met me. Timothy was gone now, but they knew of me as they did my father and, yes, most fortunately, my mother. I met Old Joseph’s daughter and Jim Moses, who took care of my father’s grave. And then we went into the church. I sat on the benches watching as the men and women filed in and suddenly the memories overwhelmed me—all I had been given in my life begun here.

I felt the tears come and swallowed quickly. I did not wish to cry. I listened as one of their own preached. I could not under
stand a word, but I didn’t condemn myself for that. At the end, Miss McBeth asked if I would like to say a word or two. I stood, my feet sore from too-tight shoes. I went barefoot often at my Chelan home. Another of their ministers translated for me and I told them of how proud I was to be among them, that they had been part of the forest of God’s trees, and like each of them, I was just one leaf. But that leaf had begun at Lapwai. And in keeping with the true meaning of The Peoples’ name, Nez Perce, I said that I pictured my parents “walking out of the woods through the forest.” Together. There were murmurs of approval. “I am proud to be the first white child born among you. Grateful I am that you helped raise me. I have done my best to bring comfort to others and bring the good words of Jesus to my family and friends too.” There were smiles and nods and then they sang a song my father or mother likely taught them. They sang it in English, the gesture like a cool breeze on a warming day. It was a hymn written the year my parents came west. “
Savior, like a shepherd, lead us / how we need thy
tender care
.” By the time they sang the refrain of the final verse,
Blessed Jesus
,
blessed Jesus
, /
thou has
loved us
,
love us still
, I had begun looking at every face, every child, hoping not to lose my memory of them nor my sight through the blurring of my tears. But I was lost: lost to their singing, lost to the memories, lost to the love. I cried like a baby.

“It is all right to cry with The People. It is all right to remember your parents and your precious lives here in Lapwai.” Miss McBeth put her hand on my shoulder, then held me with compassion. Although she spoke the words, I heard my mother’s calming voice instead, reminding me of the healing power of memories woven new with love.

Epilogue

L
APWAI
, I
DAHO
S
EPTEMBER
11, 1913

My Dear Mrs. Warren,

Word came from the Presbytery that the remains were ready for shipment and should arrive here in a day or two but they did not reach here until Thursday. Many of The People had gone to the mountains already. It is that season. But Elder Jackson and the pastor went for the precious box and brought it to the church. They set it on two chairs in front of the pulpit with two dishes of lavender and asters at either end of the box no longer than three feet. These were later taken to the cemetery. The service was in Sahaptin and we sang a song she or your father had taught. Many whites from nearby Lewiston came to hear them speak of your mother’s life, her faithfulness to God and The People. At the graveside, the pastor spoke in English and we loved the picture that he painted of husband and wife arising together among the people on Resurrection morning. It is a fitting completion to their work.

Very sincerely yours,
K.C. McBeth

Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

Much has been written about the early continental crossings of the first non-Indian missionaries, especially Henry and Eliza Spalding and Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. But few have explored the impact of those two families on the lives of the Spalding children and what happened afterward. My story of Eliza Spalding Warren, the oldest child of Henry and Eliza, began in Brownsville, Oregon, several years ago when I was asked by Linda Lewis McCormick, a Brownsville booster extraordinaire, to speak to the Brownsville Women’s Club at their one hundredth anniversary. Following that festive event, Linda told me she was working on a book about Henry Harmon Spalding, who had lived in that small Willamette Valley community one hundred fifty years earlier. Linda suggested I might want to tell Eliza the daughter’s story. “His daughter stayed here most of her life, and when she married, her father went through town saying, ‘My daughter is dead! My daughter is dead!’” Well, there’s an unanswered question to warm a novelist’s heart.

When I read Eliza’s memoir, I was even more intrigued. I wanted to know more about her relationship to her mother and the ways we misinterpret our parents’ lives, especially when they are no longer alive for us to ask questions of for clarification. She wrote of her mother’s death in 1851 in Brownsville in her memoir and the first sentence after that was: “In 1854 I married Andrew Warren.” I wondered what had happened in that very large space between 1851 and 1854.

As I researched I rediscovered the entire mission period with the Spaldings and Whitmans, Eells and Smiths, and the turbulent times following the Whitmans’ deaths. I had known that Eliza was one of the hostages taken by the Cayuse but had not realized until reading her memoir that she had been the only person who could interpret Sahaptin
—
the language of the Cayuse and Umatila and the Nez Perce—and who also was fluent in Chinookan, the trade language made up of a mix of native and French and English words. She’d been asked to interpret, and at the age of ten, I imagined that this demand was a significant weight to carry in a sustained traumatic situation, the siege continuing for thirty-nine days before the British paid the ransom for their release. Equally demanding must have been the grief of the deaths and the month-long hostage siege. And the challenge of surviving.

Several accounts of the Waiilatpu events exist. I relied on Eliza Spalding’s account, some of the trial records, Henry Spalding’s later writings, a Catholic version recounted in a 1941 book, and several online family accountings, such as for Nancy Osborne (who lived in Brownsville when Eliza did). Matilda Sager’s account, along with her siblings’ and Lorinda Bewley’s stories and Stephenie Flora’s “Whitman Massacre Roster,” noted other accounts of survivors of the tragedy as well. Eliza’s recalling her lowest moment having to do with the Nez Perce family friend,
Timothy, is taken from her memoir. Linda McCormick’s published history,
The Spaldings of the West,
proved invaluable in recreating an authentic understanding of the massacre.