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The Legislature of the Provisional Government met for its annual session in 1847 on December 7. On the following day the Governor communicated to it intelligence of a horrible massacre committed by some Cayuse Indians at a missionary settlement on the Upper Columbia. This missionary station, known as Waiilatpu, was located near Fort Walla Walla, a post of the Hudson Bay Company at the juncture of the Snake with the Columbia. News of the shocking affair had been brought down the river to Fort Vancouver by a messenger of the agent at Walla Walla, and the chief factor at the fort, James Douglas, had announced it to Governor Abernethy. Dr. Marcus Whitman, Mrs. Whitman, and some ten or eleven other persons had been killed. Forty-seven, almost all of them women and children, were captives. Other missionaries farther up in the interior were in danger. The Governor, in his annual message, sent to the Legislature the day before word of the awful tragedy reached him, had concluded his report of the situation with regard to the Indians as follows: "A number of robberies have been committed by the Indians in the upper country, upon the emigrants, as they were passing through their territory. This should not be allowed to pass. An appropriation should be made by you, sufficient to enable the Superintendent of Indian Affairs to take a small party in the spring and demand restitution of the property, or its equivalent in horses." The Whitman massacre, and the carrying of women and children into captivity, now added harrowing insult to former injury.

Not only must no time be lost in bringing the murderers to account, in rescuing the captives and in protecting the remaining stations, but the trouble-making tribes must