The Bitter Harvest

During the early part of the nineteenth century, Americans were experiencing a Christian revival of immense proportions. Charles Grandison Finney, the foremost Christian evangelist of this era, came to the Prattsburg, New York area in the summer of 1826. This region was to be the center of what became known as the Second Great Awakening,1 a movement to Christianize and civilize America and the world. Finney’s message would have an extraordinary influence on the lives of the people of Western New York. Nineteen-year old Eliza Hart and twenty-two year old Henry Harmon Spalding heard Finney’s sermons and were deeply moved by them.2 That summer, Spalding made the decision to become a minister and to devote his life to missionary work. With this aim in mind, he began a two-year course of studies at Franklin Academy in Prattsburg in the Spring of 1829.3 Eliza Hart also resolved that summer to devote her life to Christ’s cause. She later wrote in her diary: “O blessed privilege to labor in the vineyard of my Saviour, and point the lost and perishing to Him, for He is the way, the truth, and the life.”4 The resolutions that these two young people made in that summer of 1826 would have further-reaching consequences than they ever dreamed.

Just ten years later, in 1836, four courageous missionaries made an overland journey across the Rocky Mountains to what was then unfamiliar and scarcely explored territory: Old Oregon. They were the first Americans, besides explorers and fur traders, to venture over what later became known as the Oregon Trail. Two of the members of this auspicious party were women, Eliza Hart Spalding and Narcissa Whitman. They were the first White women to make the overland journey across the Rocky Mountains. They were sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions5 with their husbands, Henry Spalding and Marcus Whitman, to civilize and Christianize the Nez Perce and Cayuse Indians.6 The Whitmans were to live among the Cayuse, the Spaldings among the Nez Perce.

Spalding shared in the venturesome spirit of that movement [the Second Great Awakening] with an enthusiasm which never abated. He identified himself with it and was one of the first to go to distant Oregon, then considered by the church as a foreign mission field.

There in Old Oregon, with his courageous wife and equally courageous fellow-workers, he lived amid conditions even more primitive, and far more remote, than those of Western New York in the days of his youth.7

The Spaldings arrived at the Nez Perce village on November 29, 1836. Eleven years afterward, to the very day, the mission ended in tragedy with the massacre of Narcissa and Marcus Whitman by the Cayuse Indians. The Spaldings and their family barely escaped from the Oregon Territory with their lives. The brutal massacre had marked the end of the early missionary period of the American Board among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus have historians begun their portrayal of the heroic epic of the first missionaries among the Nez Perce Indians. While the Spaldings have been described as courageous, self-sacrificing, and benevolent missionaries, the fact remains that their mission among the Nez Perce Indians ended in catastrophe. In order to understand the motives behind their decision to become missionaries and the subsequent failure of their mission more fully, it is necessary to examine the social and cultural changes Americans were undergoing during the early nineteenth century.

---------------------------------

1. The Second Great Awakening refers to the wave of religious revivals which occurred in the United States from 1790 through the 1830's. Americans were experiencing what they considered a religious awakening and began to prepare for Christ’s second coming in the new millennium. The revivals were the way in which the message was spread. A tremendous number of young people were converted to Christianity during this period. John A. Andrew III, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens, Ga.: the University of Georgia Press, 1992), 40.

2. Eliza Hart was born on August 11, 1807 in Kensington, Connecticut. According to a record from the Southington First Congregational Church, Vol. 2, p. 75, Eliza was baptized on January 20, 1811. This record indicates that her name was originally spelled “Eliezai.” Her parents, Levi and Martha Hart, were both direct descendants of Deacon Stephen Hart, who came to America from England in 1652. Deacon Hart was one of the original settlers of Farmington, Connecticut. When Eliza was thirteen years old, her parents moved from Kensington to a farm near Prattsburg. There is little known about her youth. It is presumed she attended the local schools and then completed her education at a female seminary in nearby Clinton, New York. Upon graduation from the seminary, Eliza taught in the local schools.

Henry Harmon Spalding was born on November 26, 1803, near Wheeler, New York. What little is known about his birth and early years is extremely suspect, coming mostly from rumors circulated about the area in which he lived. Rumor has it that his was an illegitimate birth, and that his father was “persuaded” to care for him until he was fourteen months old, at which time he was “bound out” to a stranger. Deborah Lynn Dawson, “Laboring in My Savior’s Vineyard: The Mission of Eliza Hart Spalding” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 1988), 10-24; Southington First Congregational Church Records, Vol. 2, p. 75, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut; Clifford Merrill Drury, Pioneer of Old Oregon: Henry Harmon Spalding (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1936), 23-24; Lawrence Thomas Lesick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1980), 2.

3. Drury, Henry Harmon Spalding, 17, 33-34.

4. Clifford M. Drury, ed., Where Wagons Could Go, with a forward by Julie Roy Jeffries (Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1963; reprint, Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 183 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

5. Hereafter referred to as the “American Board.”
6. For consistency, and to reflect the most common usage of the nineteenth century, the term Indian is used in reference to Native Americans, the term Black in reference to African-Americans, and the term White to refer to Caucasian Americans.

7. Drury, Henry Harmon Spalding, 17.