The butcheries were harldy more atrocious than the sufferings inflicted on the survivors. The helpless women and children were compelled not only to witness the slaughter of their husbands and fathers, but were forced to yield a hateful obedience to their captors while the yet unburied remains of those dearest to them lay mangled and putrefying in their sight.[1]
Several of the women were taken for wives. Five Crows, who was declared not to have any hand in the massacre, and of whom Hines says in his Oregon History, published three years after the event, that he was a Protestant, and gave "good evidence of conversion," on the eleventh day after the outbreak sent for Miss Bewley to be brought to his lodge on the Umatilla. Nor was Five Crows an unfair sample of an Indian convert. He would have nothing to do with the destruction of the mission, but he would let it be destroyed. Being already wealthy, he cared nothing for the booty, but he could not withstand beauty.
- ↑ Spalding says in his lectures that the women were compelled to cook for large numbers of the savages daily, who called upon his daughter to taste the food and tell them if it were not poisoned. They were also ordered to sew and make garments for Indian families out of the goods belonging to the mission. Spalding also says that both the women and girls were subjected to the most revolting brutalities; 'girls so young that the knife had to be used,' is his language. Young in his deposition states that 'a few days after we got there two young women were taken as wives by the Indians, which I opposed, and was threatened by Smith, who was very anxious that it should take place, and that other little girls should be given up for wives.' Gray's Hist. Or., 483. There is no doubt from the evidence, although much was concealed from motives of delicacy toward the women, that for the time they were held prisoners at Waiilatpu, which was about a month, they were treated with the utmost brutality, the two white men being unable to defend even their own families.
mented persons who escaped from the horrors of Waiilatpu. Another fugitive was William D. Canfield, who was wounded in the hip, but succeeded in making his way to Lapwai, which place he reached on Saturday afternoon, as he himself says, 'without eating or sleeping.' Canfield was a native of Arlington, Vermont, where he was born Oct. 22, 1810. He married Sally Ann Lee, June 10, 1828, and after several removes westward finally arrived in Iowa, where he laid out the town of Oskaloosa. From that place he emigrated to Oregon. See Son. Co. Hist., 470. Joseph Smith and Elam Young also escaped. They were living with their families at the saw-mill. The natives ordered them to Waiilatpu the third day after the massacre began, but having glutted their revenge, and deeming it well to save some to grind the grain, they suffered them to live. The victims of the tragedy were 13: Dr and Mrs Whitman, Rogers, Saunders, Gillilland, Kimball, Hoffman, Marsh, Sales, Bewley, James Young, John Sager, and Francis Sager. Or. Spectator, Jan 20, 1848.
