Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/244

204 must be attributed to the perception by the more intelligent of the fact that the actual occupation of the country by white farmers, home builders, and land owners, meant their own destruction. Though this truth dawned on them only vaguely and gradually, they had begun to be somewhat familiar with it by the decade of the thirties.

The founding of American missions during that decade, as narrated earlier, at Chemeketa, Walla Walla, Lapwai, and Tshimakain, and, during the years following, the obvious intent of the Americans to draw immigration to the country, prepared the way for the first and perhaps the most ferocious, though by no means the greatest, of the four principal wars which we plan to consider. This first one was the war connected with the Whitman massacre.

We have already described the founding of the Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, six miles from the present site of Walla Walla, and twenty-six miles from the Hudson's Bay fort on the Columbia, known as Fort Walla Walla. We have also told of Whitman's journey across the continent in the mid-winter of 1842–43, of his efforts to secure the attention of Congress and of the Executive to the importance of the Oregon country, and of his return to Walla Walla in 1843, with the first large immigration of American settlers.

After the incoming of this immigration, it became more than ever clear to the more intelligent Indians that this movement of settlers portended a change in their whole condition. Their wild life could not co-exist with farming, houses, and the fixed and narrowed limits of the white man's life. Moreover, since