Bringing Indians to the Book

Introduction

INTRODUCTION M ERIWETHER LEWIS AND WILLIAM CLARK LED THEIR expedition west of the Rockies for just one winter, left very few marks on the trail, and then went home. Years passed before their discoveries were properly published-after many awkward delays and complications. Although the two young captains managed to stake some important political and intellectual claims, they hardly made a beginning at American domination of the West. In r805 Lewis and Clark had pushed beyond the limits of the Louisiana Purchase and reinforced Robert Gray's claims to the entire Columbia drainage area. Through close observation and careful record keeping, they also brought back a wealth of new information. They redrew the map of the continent, showed that there was no easy Northwest Passage, explained that the Rockies were a complex chain of high mountains, and supplied materials for the beginnings of far-Western botany, zoology, and ethnography. Yet more than twenty-five years passed before the first Americans crossed the continent to begin longterm agricultural settlements. When they arrived, they found that 3 INTRODUCTION retired French-Canadian trappers had already built homes and plowed some choice acres along the Willamette River, and that the Hudson's Bay Company was very comfortably established at Fort Vancouver, had de facto authority over the entire region, and held monopoly advantages over goods they would need. These first American settlers were Protestant missionaries, who struggled in their turn to make a significant markin this region. Within a decade they had set up farms, mills, towns, and schools, and offered support to hundreds of new settlers who followed them over the Oregon Trail. They helped foster political arrangements so that Oregon soon emerged on American maps as first a coordinated settlement, then a territory, and finally (in I 859) a new state. An unbroken line runs from the arrivals of Jason Lee, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and Henry and Eliza Spalding to the spread of white American settlers across the Northwest. In the end, all these first missionaries had to admit failure. Lee was dismissed from his post as ineffectual, and his successor dismantled his entire mission project. The Whitmans were killedby Indians who feared and hated them, and, in the resulting tensions between whites and Indians, the Spaldings were forced from their outpost. Many others abandoned mission work as hopeless, dispiriting, and exhausting. Still, these mission efforts enlarged and implicitly challenged the work of Lewis and Clark. The explorers had come overland with the object of making exact observations, and they followed ThomasJefferson 's instructions to foster peaceful relations with native people, if only for the sake of their own survival and safe return. The next generation came west with much loftier aims. They wanted to save the world, beginning with the abject, disfigured savages they expected to meet here. The missionaries may have been ignorant, naive, and driven by a zeal that now looks very odd, but their explicit purpose gave them a completely different orientation to this landscape. They were notparticu1arly mindful of plants, trees, minerals, animals, mountains, streams, or celestial observations for calculatinglatitude and longitude. They did not cock an eye (at least at first) at the potential for profit from salmon, beaver pelts, or trade routes. They came to live as model, civilized 4 INTRODUCTION Christians and to impart the highest wisdom they knew. These young men also brought young wives to the West and began to rear children here. They expected to transform raw wilderness into moderately comfortable spaces suitable for modern families. Even when wives, children, and close companions fell sick and died here, and when the Indians they met face-to-face proved indifferent, hostile, fickle, or exasperating, they persisted-believing that they were inspired and sustainedby a special calling. In short, Lewis and Clark came west under the authority of an intellectual American president, but the missionaries came, as they felt, by the will of God. The explorers came to survey the land and treat briefly with its people. The missionaries came specifically to engage with the people, and immediately found themselves entangled with the land-with hoes in their hands from the start. The relations between the explorers and these early settlers are not just a matter of contrast, however. For these separate waves of early white invaders were both people of the book-readers, writers, and record keepers, with eyes trained to take in information that might well reach a...