The Bitter Harvest

Smoke Spirit © Elan Michaels

On November 29, 1836, Henry and Eliza Spalding arrived at the Nez Perce village where they immediately began their labor in the Lord’s vineyard. According to their beliefs, Protestantism would be the key ingredient in accomplishing their task of civilizing “those whose minds are shrouded in heathen darkness.”73 It would enable them to rescue the Nez Perce from a life of misery, savagery, Satan, and sin. The annual report of the American Board, printed in 1831, reflected the Spaldings’ ideals:

When you have brought such an influence as this to bear upon the savage, he becomes conscious of his moral and intellectual nature. His understanding and his heart are disenthralled. His manners are softened. He wishes to learn . . . the arts and customs of civilized countries.”74

Under this concept, they naively believed that civilization would easily triumph over savagery. The “good” Indian would gratefully leave behind his traditional culture to form Christian settlements, and it was the job of the missionaries to accomplish this task. The Spaldings would “accept nothing less than the total rejection of the tribal past, and the total transformation of each individual Indian, a cultural destruction and regeneration.”75

However, accomplishing this task was much more difficult than they had imagined. The Spaldings became increasingly frustrated when, after years of devoted missionary work, the Indians steadfastly refused to give up their seasonal migrations and become Christian farmers. They had failed to completely understand and embrace either Christianity or civilization. The Spaldings felt they had made immense sacrifices for the benefit of their people, but the Indians had not appreciated their efforts and had refused to acknowledge their benevolence, their superiority, and their authority. In a letter to the American Board concerning his mission, Henry Spalding wrote:

[They have] an apparent disregard for the right of white men. I cannot reconcile this seeming want of gratitude with their many encouraging characteristics. Another styles them supremely selfish, which is nearer the truth.76

What the Spaldings considered as the Indian’s innate selfishness became additional proof that the Indian was “irredeemably different from the White man,”77 and could never become a productive member of White society. Given the selfishness of the Nez Perce Indians and their resistance to wholeheartedly embracing Christianity and civilization, “It gradually dawned on the missionary organizations that the Indian might be said to deserve his fate because he had refused God.”78 The Indians’ beliefs, lifestyle, and values, measured against the missionaries’ own cherished institutions, became proof to them of the Indian’s inherent inferiority.79

The Spaldings became increasingly “impatient with them and their native ways, often becoming furiously angry with them.”80 They felt justified in resorting to violence to further their efforts to civilize the Nez Perce. In 1838, Jason Lee, a neighboring Methodist missionary, wrote of the Spaldings’ methods of Christianizing the Nez Perce:

Spalding had his troubles with them, the truth is they are indians. Both [Whitman and Spalding] use highhanded measure with their people and when they deserve it let them feel the lash.81

Lee encouraged the Spaldings to be strict with their people. “Let not the Indians trifle with you, let them know that you must be respected, and whenever they intentionally transgress bounds, make them feel the weight of your displeasure.”82
 

Unbeknownst to the Spaldings, their activities had not gone entirely unnoticed by advocates of the civil rights movement back east. In the early 1840's, Protestant ministers initiated a campaign protesting the racist policies of the American Board and demanding that it withdraw its support of slavery and Indian removal. They began threatening to form a new missionary association which would support their views.83 This forced the American Board to begin re-evaluating its policies. As a result, the American Board’s advocacy of racist government policies had begun to falter.

Reverend Asa B. Smith, an American Board missionary, had witnessed the Spaldings’ violence and had been appalled by their plans for colonization of the Nez Perce and for White settlement of Nez Perce land.84 He informed the American Board, and on the 23rd of February, 1842, it sent a letter of dismissal to Spalding stating that:

. . . as your views and proceedings in respect to the missionary work are so unlike theirs, and what they suppose those of the Board to be, and in their estimation suited to hinder the progress of Christianity in that quarter and bring reproach upon it.85

Spalding was dumbfounded. He had been as completely oblivious to the rising tide of public sentiment as he had been during his college years at Western Reserve and Lane. This seeming change in what he had understood as the policy of the American Board had taken him completely by surprise. Marcus Whitman, realizing that the Spaldings’ carefully-laid plan, which he fully endorsed, was about to come undone, made the decision to return to the east. He intended to convince the American Board of the necessity of following through with the Spaldings' plan to settle and to civilize the Nez Perce in order to make way for White settlement of their valley. At this time, Eliza Spalding wrote concerning Whitman’s trip: “Doct. W’s object is to either get this mission reinforced or to obtain settlers to come and establish a colony.”86 However, the American Board remained unmoved by Whitman’s plea, forcing Spalding to take the course of humbly apologizing for his actions and promising to take a different course of action. He was reinstated as a missionary in April of 1842. Afterward, Spalding resentfully wrote concerning his true feelings in the matter: “Little good will result to a heathen mind which is constantly upon the chase & only hears a sermon once in 3, 9, or 12 months.” How could he attempt to civilize and colonize a people who were constantly “through the mts. & over the plains, like dust in a whirlwind”?87

The federal government viewed the American Board’s newly-born ambivalence to support Spalding with alarm. The Spaldings’ mission was proving to be by far the most successful of the missions attempting to carry out the government’s plan for colonization of the Indians, and they intended to see it through to completion. They sent Elijah White, an Indian agent, to institute federal law among the Nez Perce.88 White wrote in April of 1843:

I found nearer approaches to civilization and more manifest desire for improvement than I have elsewhere with in this or any other Indian country.
Their prospects are much more flattering than at any mission station in Oregon or this side of the mountains.89

The Indians had to be settled, and as soon as possible, to make way for White immigration to their very desirable territory.90

Spalding, elated by the government’s support for and enforcement of his colonization plan, resolved to carry it out with or without the cooperation of the American Board. His feelings at that time are expressed in this prayer written in his diary: “Go on thou King Immanuel conquering & to conquer” (emphases added).91
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73. Drury, Where Wagons Could Go, 178.

74. Cocks, “The Selfish Savage,” 21.

75. Dawson, “Laboring in My Savior’s Vineyard,” 74; Berkhofer, Salvation and the Savage, 13; Michael C. Coleman, Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes Toward American Indians, 1837-1893 (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 5-6, 37 (hereafter cited as Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes).

76. W. H. Gray, A History of Oregon, 1792-1849, Drawn From Personal Observation and Authentic Information (Portland, Oreg.: Harris and Holman, 1870), 237.

77. Cocks, “The Selfish Savage,” ix.

78. Ibid., 24.

79. Cocks, “The Selfish Savage,” 21; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 26, 27, 156.

80. Dawson, “Laboring in My Savior’s Vineyard,” 74.

81. Drury, Henry Harmon Spalding, 180.

82. Ibid.

83. In 1846 the American Missionary Association was founded by the abolitionists in protest to the American Board’s racist policies. In a pamphlet issued sixty years after their formation, the American Missionary Association recalled its history:
Its purpose was neither controversy nor agitation but missionary service. Its field was the world. . . . It was, indeed, itself a protest, in behalf of what it significantly termed “a pure and free Christianity.” Its radicalism is in the emphasis it lays upon an impartial Christianity. Its interpretation of Christ’s great law of love to one’s neighbor is as uncompromising and insistent as it is all-inclusive. But race prejudice dies hard. Men still draw sharp lines of discrimination against their fellow men and are angered at . . . the offer of equal privilege. . . . (Emphasis added.)
It was not strange, therefore, when this Association entered upon its work, two generations ago, that . . . the men who formed it took high ground on the question of human slavery, as they did on other debated moral questions of that day. . . .
James W. Cooper, American Missionary Association Historical Paper: Sixty Years and Beyond (New York: American Missionary Association, n.d.), 3, 4.

84. Smith wrote:
He [Spalding] has been much in the habit of using the whip or causing it to be used upon the people. He has however failed not infrequently in getting individuals whipped when he has attempted. . . .
In another instance after we arrived here. Mr. Sp. caused a woman to be whipped 70 lashes. He had married her to Williams the blacksmith. He abused her so that she ran away. She was brought back & whipped. After she had been whipped the people [Indians] were determined to whip Williams & it was with great difficulty that Mr. Sp. could prevent it. He [Williams] deserved it probably more than the woman & the Indians knew it.
Drury, Henry Harmon Spalding, 216, 235.

85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 286.

87. Drury, Henry Harmon Spalding, 216, 235, 276, 281, 286, 292.

88. Dr. Elijah White was the Indian Agent appointed by the federal government for the Indians west of the Rocky Mountains. Ibid., 294.

89. Ibid., 297.
90. Ibid., 295.
91. Ibid., 306-07.