story. Peupeumoxmox added, with true Indian cunning, that the priests pronounced the diseases from which they were suffering an affliction from God on account of their heresy; knowing well the fever into which such a statement would throw Spalding, and probably deriving as much pleasure from it as a good Methodist or Catholic could do.
During the night of Spalding's visit, a niece of Peupeumoxmox died, and he conducted the funeral services at the fort next day, when he met Brouillet and his associates, also there on a visit, with whom he conversed on the manner of teaching by the 'Catholic ladder.'[1] During the forenoon of the 27th he returned to Waiilatpu, where a messenger soon appeared from the camps of Five Crows and Tauitau, desiring the presence of Dr Whitman among their sick, a summons which the doctor with his customary alacrity obeyed. On this journey of thirty miles or more, Spalding accompanied him. It is easy to believe the latter when he says that as they rode they talked, far into the night, of their past trials and triumphs, and their present insecurity; or even that Whitman uttered the words put into his mouth, "If I am to fall by Roman Catholic influence, I believe my death will do as much good to Oregon as my life can."[2] He was a man capable of such a declaration.
- ↑ Strong's Hist. Or., MS., 43–5. Spalding also practises some duplicity, where he says in the Oregon American that no one who had not witnessed it could conceive of the intense agitation caused among the Indians by the introduction of the Catholic ladder, a chart containing rudely drawn pictures of scriptural subjects, and illustrating the doom of heretics. 'My attention,' he says, 'has suddenly been arrested by the outcries and wailings of a whole camp, occasioned by the arrival of some one with an additional explanation of the Catholic ladder, always accompanied by the declaration, "The Americans are causing us to die!" This sounds like slander. At the time of which Spalding speaks, the Catholic ladder was too well known among the Cayuses to occasion any such outburst of alarm, if ever it had done so. The wailing he heard in November was the death dirge; and if the natives exclaimed, 'The Americans are causing us to die!' such was the truth, though they had brought death without knowledge or intention of doing so.
- ↑ Oregon American, Aug. 1848, 66. This remark may have been called forth by the doctor's knowledge of an incident which occurred at the lodge of Peupeumoxmox while Spalding was there; a Nez Percé entered the lodge with the inquiry, 'Is Dr Whitman killed?' as if he expected an affirmative answer.
