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I’m at Waiilatpu again. Blood streaks across the face of Dr. Whitman, who falls victim to a hatchet, then a gun. I jerk at the sounds. Frank Sager had run away days before, but he is back, then shot by the Indian Joe Lewis. He falls dead at my feet. We’re in the house. My limbs feel cold and numb. I hear the Indians’ muffled calls to Mrs. Whitman, promising they will harm her no more. Mr. Rogers, our beloved teacher, holds her by the elbow as they come into this room and I see that she’s been shot; his arm hangs loose with blood pouring. The smell suffocates. She sees her husband dead and falls, nearly pulls Mr. Rogers down. I cannot move. A Cayuse, maybe one who shot her, lifts then walks her to the chaise lounge. So strange—to aid the one you’ve injured. Then another raises his hatchet against our teacher, who shouts out, “Oh God, no!” Mr. Rogers falls. Blood arcs onto his murderer’s face as the man turns toward me. A dozen others whooping like cranes singing of their victory rush past him, pulling him toward others who have come from the barns to see what the noise is about. The smell is thick in my throat. The sounds deafening yet muffled like I am underwater. The curious are struck down in seconds; the chunk of blade to bone, a sound so fiercely final. I pull my apron starched with bluing over my face, inhale the scent wet with blood. I push away the sounds, and stand frozen while all around me I hear the heart-cries of death. We children from the school stay silent, await our end. I hear horses, more shouts, then in a language I can understand, Chinookan mixed with Cayuse and Sahaptin, we are told to “Go! There!” I turn to the
children, tell them to move, and like cattle we are herded to a room with immigrants, poor people merely stopping on their way west. It’s cold, evening now, as we huddle. A man shot in the belly groans, begs to be finished. He dies in the night but I do not remember that. Nor did I hear Mr. Canfield, wounded, slip away toward Lapwai. I sleep, blessed sleep protecting me, as later imagining all the awfuls in the world would become a way to contain the uncertainties in my life.

“Eliza! Get smelling salts.” My father shook me. “Help now. Poor Rachel.” His voice pulled me back into this present moment. He didn’t notice where I’d gone or that I shivered. “This is too much for Rachel’s sensitive nature. But she so wanted to help with butchering. Go on. Get the salts, Daughter. You’re all right.”

I stumbled to our cabin, slowly back into this place of autumn leaves, the sound of geese calling to each other high above. For a moment their calls were cranes above Waiilatpu, but the dog’s nose against my hand as I walked kept me here. “Yaka. Good boy.” I let him come inside while I pulled the smelling salts from the box, my hands shaking. I checked on the stove, made sure the damper was closed so we didn’t have to tend to it for now. My ritual of safety completed, I headed back out, the molding leaves of autumn musking the air. I put my arms beneath Rachel, and she sat up as I swept the salts beneath her nose. With my father, we half carried her to the cabin where she rested all day, and my father and I—with the help of Henry Hart and the little ones— finished the slaughter of the hog. My mother would have helped without fainting. And she would have seen me disappear and brought me back to warming arms to stop my shaking. My father defiled our mother’s memory with his marriage, even if Rachel did her best. She would never be as good as my mother’s worst.

The Diary of Eliza Spalding

1850

I fail my husband, not being able to care for my household. Horace my dear brother has agreed to remain with me during the trial. I am so grateful, as I have three children to care for and my own health has deteriorated. Do I repeat myself? I should look back in this diary and see if I speak overly much of my trials. Long hours I spend in bed, praying through a persistent cough that tires me more than when I taught school, sewed, dried foods, picked berries, and yes, rode horses, the latter for pure joy and the feel of the wind in my hair, the sun on my face.

Gracious God in heaven, be with my family, me. Help me to set aside these thoughts of anger and betrayal directed at the Mission Board, my husband’s insistence to expose Eliza to yet more pain. Help me see that you are in all places, light and darkness, that we can better see the light because we have wandered in the shadows. With gratitude for the lives you spared I remain your humble servant. Amen.

I was strong on our journey west, though more than once I asked Mr. S to leave me behind. It was a genuine request to hasten a death I thought could not be avoided. I did not wish to be responsible for the deterioration of the work we’d been set to do. I didn’t complain. It was a practical matter. I was with child and, merciful God, may I one day understand—I lost the infant. And if this was God’s provision for me, an early death to bring me to his Presence, I was prepared for it. But my dear husband would set our tent at night, cook over our fire, settle me in, bring me tea. And by morning, I would be better. Praise God.

I suppose a part of me did not wish to let my husband go on without me, traveling with Narcissa Whitman, a woman Mr. Spalding had once proposed to, though she had declined. We were near the fort at Laramie when Mr. Spalding once confided to me that he wondered if we ought to have come with the Whitmans. “I question her judgment,” he whispered. “She wasn’t wise enough to accept my offer of marriage so I’m not sure I have confidence in her ability to truly teach the Gospel.”

I confess I’d been surprised to hear him speak that way. I found her cheery and lovely to behold, as the fur trapping party we traveled with demonstrated daily, tipping their beaver hats to her, leaning in when she lifted her tinkling voice, chasing after her bonnet when the wind caught it and it sailed away. A simple neck string would have solved that problem.

I hope he will remarry, my dear Mr. S. I would pray that he would find a helpmate for him, someone to carry on the work away from Lapwai, though I pray he might one day return there. I never will. My days are numbered.

Mr. S waited on me on that journey. Tended me after we escaped to the Forest Grove, and I improved enough to teach at the little academy. Today my dear brother waits on me, brings me tea. Like Mr. S, he can cook. And we speak easily together (through my coughing) about New York and Ohio where I attended classes beside my husband, how I ran a boardinghouse for students to pay for Mr. S’s schooling. “You could do that here,” Horace offers. “You love to teach.”

“I do. But I have a feeling that I won’t be long in this world.”

“Oh, don’t even say such a thing. You’re what, forty?”

“Forty-two. I’ll be forty-three in August. If I live that long.”

“You’ve a babe to raise.”

Dear Millie. She is an active child.

“Matilda helped raise my others. And dear Eliza.” There Eliza sits with her father at the trial of those Cayuse, caught, confessed. They will be hung, no doubt. The trial feeds the people who hunger for actions that take them from their powerlessness. They seek revenge more than truth or justice. Eliza should not have to be there, but my words to Mr. Spalding fall on deaf ears. A deaf mind as well. He has been so different since those days following the tragedy. And now, two years later, there is this trial and Eliza attends because her father insists she will be the best reporter, calmly telling of what happened, how she was the only one who could understand the hostage-holders’ language and thus communicated with them, expressed their desires to the hostages and then to British messengers negotiating their release. We’ll never know the terrors she experienced while under siege. She will never know ours, believing she was dead, fearing for our lives.

Horace cut into my memory. “Don’t be absurd. Matilda is a lovely Indian woman but she certainly did not instill in your children the love of God you tout so strongly. You’re needed.”

“I wish you knew the Lord, Horace.” I patted his hand, strong, with liver spots.

“I know of him well.” He grinned at me, then removed the rag from my forehead and prepared another mustard paste to grab the fever that came and went like bad dreams.

“You would find in him a kindred spirit of kindness and gentleness.”

“Maybe I know him through you.”

“It’s not the same,” I told him. “Think what joy it would bring to me to have one more soul to anticipate seeing in heaven.”

“Enjoy the soul you have before you,” he said. “And appreciate my cooking.”

Have I told him how much his presence meant to me when we learned of the assault? Or how grateful I was that he did not panic but cautioned us to wait to see what the word truly was, whether Mr. S and our Eliza were actually gone from this world? I doubt I’ve told him. I will do so before I die. Let him know that his arrival was God-sent, to be there when I grieved my daughter and husband’s death; to be there when Mr. S arrived emaciated and in shock as we learned there were hostages as well as deaths and prayed that Eliza was alive. Then the Nez Perce came and whisked us farther up the canyon, for our safety, they said. For all we knew, we were being held hostage too, awaiting our own demise.

7
Held Hostage

My memories weave a complex web. They hold me hostage one day so I can’t act; other days they send me toward plans that might not be the best for me. No words would ever make my father consent to our marriage, even if I approached contrite, even if Mr. Warren was baptized a believer. So long as my siblings needed tending and Rachel gained few house husbandry skills, and I was stuck at home, I’d remain his true assistant in his work. Rachel had begun teaching school. Henry Hart cooked when I traveled with my father. But a year from now, I had decided, Andrew and I would marry. Wouldn’t my mother want that for me? Happiness with a good man?

Christmas was a lovely time that year, 1853. The school became a vision of the party and feast in
A Christmas Carol
, a book by Mr. Dickens that Rachel had shipped from Boston and read to the little girls. I eavesdropped as I mashed potatoes. It was the only time I ever saw my father lose his temper
with Rachel, yelling at her for bringing fiction into the house, for tainting our minds with untruths. But the story spoke of memories, of experiences gone that could still touch us. The ghost of the future was a crooked finger beckoning us to make the future different, to somehow learn from what had happened in the past and make the present a more comforting, kind, and, yes, safe place.

“God can use anything,” Rachel told him. “Don’t you remember the biblical Nathan who told a story to David that changed David’s heart?”

My father relented then and let her read it to us more than once. I loved the rendering of the feast on Christmas morning when Scrooge has blended past with future into present, willing to change while he still had the chance, to let the past transform him rather than define him. I thought how lovely it would be to decorate the school with greens and berries and mistletoe for the Christmas program, hoping to capture the joys of the season that we’d all known when my mother was alive.

I garnered my sisters and Nancy Osborne and a few others to string popped corn and berries on the tree my father chopped to put inside the schoolhouse that winter. Small candles we made ourselves decorated the tree, and Mr. Warren offered to be one of the guards to douse any branch that might catch fire. My father could hardly refuse him. We arched greens over the few windows, hung them with mistletoe given up by the oaks. My father said Meriwether Lewis called it the Great Grape of the Columbia during the Corps of Discovery that opened up the West. Small apples with more red than brown highlighted the greens upon the mantel as they surrounded the large candle I’d made and placed in the center.

For additional decoration we hung our quilts created by the women of Brownsville. Carpenter’s Wheel. Crown of Thorns.
Barn Raising with Prairie Points. We encouraged scrap quilts with reds and greens and whites and hung one or two by wealthier women whose work was made of only those three colors. They could afford the material while the rest of us used bits and pieces. The evening flickered with candles and the voices of neighbors grateful to have survived another year, feeling blessed to have a teacher and a pastor in my father and his new wife.