A nineteenth-century attack by Native Americans on a Presbyterian mission in what would become the Oregon Territory proved to be a turning point in the history of the American West. This book examines the tangled legacy of that event.

A highly readable, myth-busting, fact-based story. A tale for all who love the West, its history and its truths.
-The Inlander

Historian and journalist Cassandra Tate takes a fresh look at the personalities, dynamics, disputes, social pressures, and shifting legacy of the Whitman Massacre-a pivotal event in the history of the American West-including the often-missing Indian point of view.

In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, devout missionaries from upstate New York, established a Presbyterian mission on Cayuse Indian land near what is now the fashionable wine capital of Walla Walla, Washington. Eleven years later, a group of Cayuses killed the Whitmans and eleven others in what became known as the Whitman Massacre. The attack led to a war of retaliation against the Cayuse; the extension of federal control over the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming; and martyrdom for the Whitmans. Today, however, the Whitmans are more likely to be demonized as colonizers than revered as heroes.

A gripping adventure story…Tate’s account is a prism that allows us to see the multiple dimensions of a classic frontier conflict.
-Peter Stark, author ofAstoria- John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire

Tate tells the Cayuse’s side of the story with empathy and clarity…She writes with a flair and transparency unusual in such a meticulously researched book. –The Seattle Times