Download or read book Murder at the Mission written by Blaine Harden and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award “Terrific.” –Timothy Egan, The New York Times “A riveting investigation of both American myth-making and the real history that lies beneath.” –Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, a “terrifically readable” (Los Angeles Times) account of one of the most persistent “alternative facts” in American history: the story of a missionary, a tribe, a massacre, and a myth that shaped the American West In 1836, two missionaries and their wives were among the first Americans to cross the Rockies by covered wagon on what would become the Oregon Trail. Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries. But Spalding would succeed as a propagandist, inventing a story that recast his friend as a hero, and helped to fuel the massive westward migration that would eventually lead to the devastation of those they had purportedly set out to save. As Spalding told it, after uncovering a British and Catholic plot to steal the Oregon Territory from the United States, Whitman undertook a heroic solo ride across the country to alert the President. In fact, he had traveled to Washington to save his own job. Soon after his return, Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were massacred by a group of Cayuse. Though they had ample reason - Whitman supported the explosion of white migration that was encroaching on their territory, and seemed to blame for a deadly measles outbreak - the Cayuse were portrayed as murderous savages. Five were executed. This fascinating, impeccably researched narrative traces the ripple effect of these events across the century that followed. While the Cayuse eventually lost the vast majority of their territory, thanks to the efforts of Spalding and others who turned the story to their own purposes, Whitman was celebrated well into the middle of the 20th century for having "saved Oregon." Accounts of his heroic exploits appeared in congressional documents, The New York Times, and Life magazine, and became a central founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. Exposing the hucksterism and self-interest at the root of American myth-making, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the cost of American expansion, and of the problems that can arise when history is told only by the victors.
Download or read book Converting the West written by Julie Roy Jeffrey and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1994-03-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narcissa Whitman and her husband, Marcus, were pioneer missionaries to the Cayuse Indians in Oregon Territory. Very much a child of the Second Great Awakening, Narcissa eagerly the burgeoning evangelical missionary movement. Following her marriage to Marcus Whitman, she spent most of 1836 traveling overland with him to Oregon. Narcissa enthusiastically began service as a missionary there, hoping to see many "benighted" Indians adopt her message of salvation through Christ. But not one Indian ever did. Cultural barriers that Narcissa never grasped effectively kept her at arm's length from the Cayuse. Gradually abandoning her efforts with the Indians, Narcissa developed a different ministry. She taught and counseled whites on the mission compound, much as she had done in her own church circles in New York. Meanwhile, the growing number of eastern emigrants streaming into the territory posed an increasing threat to the Indians. The Cayuse ultimately took murderous action against the Whitmans, the most visible whites, thus ending dramatically Narcissa's eleven-year effort to be a faithful Christian missionary as well as a devoted wife and loving mother. --From publisher's description.
Download or read book Where Wagons Could Go written by Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narcissa Whitman and her husband, Marcus, went to Oregon as missionaries in 1836, accompanied by the Reverend Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza. It was, as Narcissa wrote, “an unheard of journey for females.” Narcissa Whitman kept a diary during the long trip from New York and continued to write about her rigorous and amazing life at the Protestant mission near present-day Walla Walla, Washington. Her words convey her complex humanity and devotion to the Christian conversion and welfare of the Indians. Clifford Drury sketches in the circumstances that, for the Whitmans, resulted in tragedy. Eliza Spalding, equally devout and also artistic, relates her experiences in a pioneering venture. Drury also includes the diary of Mary Augusta Dix Gray and a biographical sketch of Sarah Gilbert White Smith, later arrivals at the Whitman mission.
Download or read book How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon written by Oliver Woodson Nixon and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa Whitman established a mission in the Oregon Territory in the 1840s. The Cayuse Indians accused the Whitmans of spreading disease among the tribe and killed the Whitmans and many others. Other missionaries established a college in their name in Walla Walla, Washington.
Download or read book Providence and the Invention of American History written by Sarah Koenig and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How providential history--the conviction that God is an active agent in human history--has shaped the American historical imagination In 1847, Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman was killed after a disastrous eleven-year effort to evangelize the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. By 1897, Whitman was a national hero, celebrated in textbooks, monuments, and historical scholarship as the "Savior of Oregon." But his fame was based on a tall tale--one that was about to be exposed. Sarah Koenig traces the rise and fall of Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman's legend, revealing two patterns in the development of American history. On the one hand is providential history, marked by the conviction that God is an active agent in human history and that historical work can reveal patterns of divine will. On the other hand is objective history, which arose from the efforts of Catholics and other racial and religious outsiders to resist providentialists' pejorative descriptions of non-Protestants and nonwhites. Koenig examines how these competing visions continue to shape understandings of the American past and the nature of historical truth.
Download or read book Attack in the Rye Grass written by Dave Jackson and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The adventures of a young American boy who travels to the Oregon Territory with his missionary aunt and uncle. Ages 8 to 12.
Download or read book Trails of the Pathfinders written by George Bird Grinnell and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee written by Dee Brown and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “fascinating” #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West (The Wall Street Journal). First published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee generated shockwaves with its frank and heartbreaking depiction of the systematic annihilation of American Indian tribes across the western frontier. In this nonfiction account, Dee Brown focuses on the betrayals, battles, and massacres suffered by American Indians between 1860 and 1890. He tells of the many tribes and their renowned chiefs—from Geronimo to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse—who struggled to combat the destruction of their people and culture. Forcefully written and meticulously researched, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee inspired a generation to take a second look at how the West was won. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Download or read book History of Jay County Indiana written by M. W. Montgomery and published by . This book was released on 1864 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Children of the Covered Wagon written by Mary Jane Carr and published by Christian Liberty Press. This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young children will love to read this historically-accurate, personal account of pioneers heading west on the Oregon Trail during the mid-1800s. Great illustrations, large print and helpful maps will enhance your child's journey through this exciting historical period.
Download or read book Across the Plains In 1844 written by Catherine Sager Pringle and published by . This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sager orphans (sometimes referred to as Sager children) were the children of Naomi and Henry Sager. In April 1844 Henry Sager and his family took part in the great westward migration and started their journey along the Oregon Trail. During their journey both Naomi and Henry Sager lost their lives and left their seven children orphaned. Later adopted by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, missionaries in what is now Washington, the children were orphaned a second time, when both their new parents were killed during the Whitman massacre in November 1847. Catherine (1835-1910), the eldest of the Sager girls, married Clark Pringle, a Methodist minister and bore him 8 children. They lived in Spokane, Washington. About 1860, ten years after her arrival in Oregon, she wrote a first-hand account of their journey across the plains and their life with the Whitmans. This account today is regarded as one of the most authentic accounts of the American westward migration. She hoped to earn enough money to set up an orphanage in the memory of Narcissa Whitman. She never found a publisher. Catherine died on August 10, 1910, at the age of seventy-five.
Download or read book Across the Plains in 1884 written by Catherine Sager and published by . This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book River Lost written by Blaine Harden and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997-11-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the destruction of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest by well-intentioned Americans who saw only the benefits of the dam-building, power plant and irrigation projects, not realizing the longterm effects of killing the river.
Download or read book Historic Adventures written by Rupert Sargent Holland and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dreams of El Dorado written by H. W. Brands and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.
Download or read book The Apocalypse Factory Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age written by Steve Olson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling narrative of scientific triumph, decades of secrecy, and the unimaginable destruction wrought by the creation of the atomic bomb. It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, and many thousands of others—the physicists, engineers, laborers, and support staff at the facility—manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilization. With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Steve Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Olson, who grew up just twenty miles from Hanford’s B Reactor, recounts how a small Washington town played host to some of the most influential scientists and engineers in American history as they sought to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever created. The Apocalypse Factory offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and, ultimately, of lethal hubris.
Download or read book I Am a Stranger Here Myself written by Debra Gwartney and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 WILLA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Women Writing the West Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn in to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family. Arranged in four sections as a series of interlocking explorations and ruminations, Gwartney uses Whitman as a touchstone to spin a tightly woven narrative about identity, the power of womanhood, and coming to peace with one's most cherished place.
