In 1836, missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman founded the Whitman Mission among the Cayuse Native Americans at Waiilatpu, six miles west of present-day Walla Walla, Washington. Beyond evangelizing, the Whitmans established schools and grist mills and introduced crop irrigation. However, despite initial successes, they failed to baptize any Cayuse into their church. The Cayuse War was triggered by the Whitman massacre of 1847, in which the Cayuse attacked the missionary outpost in response to a deadly measles epidemic that they believed was caused by Marcus Whitman.
The Whitman massacre of 1847 marked the beginning of armed conflict between the Cayuse people of the Northwestern United States and settlers backed by the U.S. government. Following the massacre, the Provisional Government of Oregon and later the United States Army battled the Native Americans east of the Cascades over the next few years through 1855.
The Cayuse War proved historically significant as the first of several wars between Native Americans and American settlers in the region. The conflict ultimately led to negotiations between the United States and Native Americans of the Columbia Plateau, which resulted in the creation of several Indian reservations. This pattern of warfare and subsequent treaty negotiations would define U.S.-Native American relations in the Pacific Northwest for decades to come.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
13 killed including Marcus and Narcissa Whitman; 47 taken captive
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