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A4 • Friday, June 21, 2019 | Seaside Signal | SeasideSignal.com SignalViewpoints A frontier tragedy with lasting legacy Eve Marx Back on my wrist again, after a long hiatus. The return of the Native bracelet VIEW FROM THE PORCH EVE MARX I Wikimedia Commons SEEN FROM SEASIDE R.J. MARX A uthor Debra Gwartney is coming to the South County this spring for a signing at Beach Books. Her “part history, part memoir,” “I Am a Stranger Here Myself” links diverse threads of her life in the Northwest and the saga of Narcissa Whit- man, the fi rst white woman to cross the Con- tinental Divide. Whitman’s daughter Alice was the fi rst white woman born in Oregon Country. “As a whole, in the West we’ve never really dealt with the attack that killed all those people,” Gwartney said in a recent radio interview. “We tend to isolate those incidents and forget how they become part of us, or embedded in us in some way.” Massacre On Nov. 29, 1847, missionaries Narcissa and her husband, Marcus Whitman, a physi- cian, were among 12 settlers killed by mem- bers of the Cayuse tribe. The incident that was to become known as the Whitman Massacre, took place at Waiilatpu, the name Marcus Whitman gave his mission in the fall of 1836. On Nov. 29, 1847, several men, secretly bearing hatchets and guns, visited Whitman under the pretense of a medical visit. In the ensuing attack, 60 Cayuses and Umatillas killed the Whitmans, 11 or 12 at the mission and took 53 people hostage. Eye- witnesses — there were about 50 survivors, mostly children — reported the assailants used their tomahawks to release evil spirits dwelling within the whites. Marcus Whitman was battered beyond recognition, and Nar- cissa was shot. There were many versions of what hap- pened that day, she said, but it was “bloody and terrible,” In “I Am a Stranger Here Myself,” the prose is dramatic and unsparing in describing the massacre. Narcissa Whitman “was shot a dozen times on a cold day in 1847,” Gwartney writes, “men whipping her laid-bare back while she was still breathing. As darkness was coming on, as temperatures fell below zero, she was rolled into an irrigation ditch and left to die.” The killing of the missionaries came as revenge for the seizing of Indian lands. The incident was so brutal, Gwartney writes, a Cayuse man returned to the ditch to smash in Narcissa’s skull. “This was an assurance, the tribe believed that tion of a hanging I can remember. “Without pausing he swung the the missionaries who’d lived hatchet as he took the last step as increasingly unwelcome and there was a solid chunk neighbors for 11 years would as the blade buried itself be barred from the afterlife they’d so loudly glorifi ed.” in the wood. The ends of News of the violence the rope whipped wildly stirred outrage “all the through the rings as the way back to Washington, tap dropped and banged D.C., where legislators against the supports of the hired U.S. Marshall Joe underside and the fi ve Cay- use plummeted.” Meek to assign a governor of the provisional govern- Monday looked up at the sky, Berry writes, “where the ment, George Abernathy. One of Abernathy’s fi rst acts indifferent sun poured joy and as head of the state was to declare energy into the world below. No, war on the Cayuse Nation. “Nar- Narcissa Whitman he thought. No, not on a day like cissa’s death along (was) justifi - this.” cation enough raise an army to strike out in And yet on a day like this in 1848 — retribution.” when fi ve Indian chiefs suffered the ulti- Retribution was fast and severe, with mately punishment before the settlers of exclusionary rules meting punishment who the new world and their God — is where it Native Americans who crossed “newly estab- begins. Violence begets violence and Mon- lished and often invisible boundaries.” day is soon to experience his own personal The laws were to dictate the fate of gener- and family tragedy. ations of Native Americans in our state. Aftermath ‘Moontrap’ The Cayuse were losing the war, Gwart- Another Northwest author, the master- ney picks up in her narrative. ful Don Berry, who died in 2001, fi ctional- “Less than half were still alive, most hid- ized the immediate aftermath of the Whit- den in the mountains, sick and starved. They man massacre and the sense of fear that no longer occupied any of the land around pervaded the territory in his Waiilatpu. No one did. The place was empty.” novel, “Moontrap,” sec- In years to come, the govern- ond of the “Oregon Trilogy,” ment “pretty much wiped out that with “Trask” and “To Build a tribe and took all the land for white Ship.” settlers,” Gwartney said. “Their Berry, his widow Kajira deaths made a huge difference in the West.” Berry recalled last fall, loved the Northwest in “all its Two Cayuse chiefs remained among the tribal leaders to negoti- rainy glory,” and spent spent ate a treaty in Walla Walla, about eight many days wandering or miles from the Whitman Mission. hunting all over Clatsop The sovereign nations of Walla Walla, County. He was one-eighth Umatilla and Cayuse secured a reserva- Native American, Fox, and tion of 510,000 acres, but surrendering always had an affi nity for “Moontrap,” set in their access to traditional hunting and wildness.” As Gwartney seeks to fi nd 1850, by author fi shing grounds. Don Berry. the biographical narrative Today, the visitor’s center of Waii-Lat- core of Narcissa and Marcus Poo is “sparsely visited,” Gwartney writes. Whitman, Berry stepped into A visitor can peer through smudged the subjective realm of the observer at the glass to study excavated items from the site: a courthouse, where tribal men accused of mur- pair of broken eyeglasses, chipped plates and der were on trial for their lives. cups, a torn Bible and a set of mannequins Berry’s protagonist, Johnson Monday, a enacting the fi rst encounter between Cayuse witness to the courthouse scene, is caught and missionaries. between two worlds: a settler married to a “On one side, a tall man and woman — Native woman, emotions are ripped asunder. her knees bent as if in prayer, her long arms His Shoshone wife, Mary, recognizes stretched out, palm raised in supplication the complex net they have both entered as a — who look down on small brown Native “mixed race” couple in those frontier days. “I women on the other side,” Gwartney writes. say, you wish to be Shoshone, you must do “Most of the Native women are kneel- what the Shoshone headmen say. You wish to ing in the dirt, planting seeds, with woven be white, you must do what the white reed hats atop their heads,” the author writes. headmen say.” “Every time I take in this scene, I fi nd myself At the courthouse for the trial, wishing that both sides had remained exactly “Indian women on the stairs began this far apart for the decade they were around to howl a death chant for their people each other. Curious about each other, but already dead and about to die,” Berry protected from whatever harm they could writes. “The keening was uncanny in infl ict.” the crowded room.” Gwartney’s conclusion refl ects the con- The courtroom scene and verdict are fl icted feelings we all feel as we inherit this practically a foregone conclusion, as fi ve beautiful land around on. chieftains of the Cayuse tribe are sen- “I’m still trying to fi gure it out,” she tenced to hanging. writes. “I’m trying to make my way through It is Marshall Joe Meek himself who a miasma of doubt to give permission to “I Am a Stranger “clumped heavily on the steps and strode call myself a woman of the West — even Here Myself,” by across the platform” of the scaffolding, on the days I can’t quite grasp what that Debra Gwartney. Berry writes in the most lyrical descrip- means.” PUBLISHER EDITOR Kari Borgen R.J. Marx CIRCULATION MANAGER PRODUCTION MANAGER CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jeremy Feldman John D. Bruijn ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER SYSTEMS MANAGER Sarah Silver- Tecza Carl Earl Skyler Archibald Darren Gooch Joshua Heineman Rain Jordan Katherine Lacaze Eve Marx Cara Mico Esther Moberg n college, living in a little college town, there was a shop in that town selling what was known as hippie-dippy things. There was a shelf of hand-thrown pottery, mostly cereal bowls and coffee mugs; there were candles and handmade soaps and batik bedspreads. There was incense. You could buy macramé plant-hangers and small batch potpourri. In addition to a limited line of denim (I remember purchasing my one and only pair of overalls), in a locked case along one wall there was a selection of fi ne hand- made jewelry, some of it Native American. For the entirety of my fi nal semester, senior year, I coveted a rather spendy sterling silver Native American cuff bracelet whose cen- ter was an oblong stone of green turquoise. There was a hairline crack in the stone that to me only made the bracelet more beauti- ful. I tried it on a few times, but I never had enough money to purchase. At graduation, my college boyfriend’s mother surprised me by gifting me the brace- let. I was overjoyed and oblivious to the notion she might have thought of the brace- let as a sort of pre-engagement present. Her son and I never did become engaged as I went off to graduate school and he fell in love with a red-haired beauty who he mar- ried shortly after. I wore the bracelet every day because I loved it and was glad to see it on my wrist. Only after I married someone else and had a child did I fi nally take it off. I put it in my jewelry box and there it stayed for 15 years. At which time I took it out and in a fever of purging my belongings, I gave it to the 15 year old daughter of my best friend who wore it a few times before putting it to rest in her own jewelry box. Fast forward to last summer when Mr. Sax and I visited Santa Fe. It wasn’t the greatest trip as they were experiencing a shocking to me heatwave. We went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and we booked a private hot tub and sauna at the spa Ten Thousand Waves. We had dinner one night with an old friend. It being too hot to sight- see, we spent most of our time drinking mar- garitas. We spent an inordinate amount of time in the shops looking at Native American jewelry. I fell in love with a few pieces but they were way out of my price range, and then I remembered I had a beautiful Native American bracelet that I had given away. My whole life I’ve had a fascination with Native American jewelry. For the record, I also love moccasins, deerskin apparel, dream catchers, and tipis. I don’t have a drop of Native ancestry. And yet I feel completely drawn to their jewelry. Back home, I found a website called Pueblo Direct that sells the Tommy Singer cuff bracelets I’d so admired in Santa Fe. Singer, who was born in 1940 and passed away in 2014, was a world famous Navajo silversmith with a distinctive style. He learned silversmithing from his father, a Navajo Medicine man, when he was just a lad. Singer’s early works were done in the silver overlay technique, but over time, he began to work more with turquoise. Using scrap turquoise chips, he pioneered the tech- nique of chip inlay. I beat myself up a little after we got home that I didn’t just fork up and buy a piece when we were in New Mex- ico. The guy’s dead. He’s not making any more bracelets. The thought I might die and never see my old silver and turquoise bracelet again haunted me. I hadn’t laid eyes on it in 17 years. But it was seven months before I brought up the subject of the bracelet to my best friend. I asked if her daughter still had it and she said she would ask. Her daugh- ter lives very far away, although close to her mother, my friend. Four years ago, I moved across the country. To my amazement I went to the mailbox about a week later and there was a package. Inside was the bracelet. Miracles do happen. I’ve got one on my wrist to prove it. Seaside Signal Letter policy Subscriptions The Seaside Signal is published every other week by EO Media Group, 1555 N. Roosevelt, Seaside, OR 97138. 503-738-5561 seasidesignal.com Copyright © 2019 Seaside Signal. Nothing can be reprinted or copied without consent of the owners. The Seaside Signal welcomes letters to the editor. The deadline is noon Monday prior to publication. Letters must be 400 words or less and must be signed by the author and include a phone number for verifi cation. We also request that submissions be limited to one letter per month. Send to 1555 N. Roosevelt Drive, Seaside, OR 97138, drop them off at 1555 N. 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