The Big Lie No One Talks About
Maybe because you'd have to rename half the sites in the Northwest.
Before the Big Lie of 2021, there was the Big Lie of 1847.
A missionary named Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and eleven others were brutally murdered by members of the Cayuse tribe near present-day Walla Walla, Washington.
For 150 years, Whitman was considered a national hero and a martyr. Schools, parks, highways, hotels, bridges, and even a glacier are named after him.
But the truth about Whitman’s life and death is a lot more complicated.
According to Blaine Harden, my guest on the pod this week, most of what we thought we knew about Marcus Whitman is a fable dreamed up by another missionary named Reverend Henry Spalding and other opportunists. They used the massacre to justify the U.S. expansion into the Northwest territory, Manifest Destiny, and the genocide of thousands of Native people.
Harden uncovers this fascinating story in his impeccably researched new book Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking the American West.
Harden is a longtime foreign correspondent who reported for The Washington Post from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Northeast Asia. He has written three acclaimed books about North Korea.
But for this book, Harden shifts his focus to his hometown of Washington. Amazingly, one of his earliest childhood memories is playing Marcus Whitman in a school play.
On the podcast, Harden takes us back into a time considered the Second Great Awakening, which “transformed millions of unchurched Americans into ardent, evangelical, conversion-focused Protestants.” Fun!
The result was God-ordained expansion into the west and the belief that settlers needed to civilize Native Americans by converting them to Christianity.
In the case of the Whitmans, that didn’t go so well. The couple converted a total of two people in their 11 years in the Northwest, and along the way, they managed to piss off a lot of people with their arrogance and bitterness. Wait until you hear what they did when smallpox arrived in their community.
But I don’t want to spoil the story. You’ll have to listen to the podcast and buy the book to get the juicy details. Enjoy!