Page:Columbia - America's Great Highway.djvu/137

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APPENDIX "B"

The Whitman Massacre

NOVEMBER, 1847

GROUP OF FOUR SURVIVORS.
Mrs. Nancy Osborn Jacobs
Mrs. Elizabeth Sager Helm Mrs. Helen M. Saunders Church Mrs. Gertrude Hall Denny

Mrs. Jennie Christenson, the daughter of Mrs. Church, stands on the left.
Mrs. Marie Stratton, the daughter of Mrs. Helm, stands on the right.

The terrible massacre which occurred November 29-30, 1847, at the Whitman Mission, six miles west of the present city of Walla Walla, Washington, can never be forgotten.

Dr. Whitman and his sweet wife, together with twelve others, were massacred, and the buildings were burned, by the Cayuse Indians. More than fifty women and children were taken prisoners, but were rescued by Peter Skeen Ogden, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, and were taken to Oregon City early in January, 1848. On the 28th day of June, 1915, sixty-seven years after that horrible event, Mrs. Church, now in her eighty-first year, met three other survivors, whom she had not seen since she was a girl of fourteen, when they parted company at Oregon City.

The five Indians who led in the murderous attack on the Whitman Mission were captured. They were tried by a jury of twelve men; were convicted and hung at Oregon City on the third day of June, 1850.—George H. Himes, of the Oregon Historical Society.

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