Kevin Costner's the West (2025) s01e03 Episode Script

What would cause you to
leave your family and your home
and travel to a place
where almost no one
speaks your language?
No one looks like you.
Your customs are foreign,
and where if you get in trouble,
no one you know is around to help.
For many, what drove them
west was the promise of land.
For a few, it was their faith,
and that's what moved
Christian missionaries Narcissa
and Marcus Whitman to
travel across the continent.
Their journey along the Oregon trail
will inspire thousands to follow,
and spark a fateful
encounter with a native nation
that redefines the pacific northwest.
People live on myths,
and the myths that really
stick in the American experience
are the myths of the west.
The mountains were taller,
the deserts were harsher.
The snows were deeper.
American west conjures
wonder, possibility, opportunity.
The figure of the mountain man.
Notorious outlaws.
The cowboy.
The discovery of gold in California.
This train of wagons
trailing across the prairie.
Everybody has a reason
for wanting this land.
But most of that land
was already occupied.
We have been residents
for more than 10,000 years.
But this is a clash of two different ways
of seeing life itself,
fighting for the future
of your homeland on the one side,
and fighting for the
destiny of the new republic
on the other side.
The history of the
west is a creation story.
It's a creation of what we
think of as modern america.
The west is a place
where anything is possible.
It is the essence of the American dream.
The core of this is, what
are we to be as a nation?
The reckoning is coming.
The west is this canvas
on which American dreams
become larger than life.
The year is 1836,
the final year of Andrew
Jackson's presidency.
The us now has 24 states
and four territories stretching
across the Mississippi river,
but the Americans have
their eyes on the pacific coast.
California is part of Mexico,
but Oregon country is up for grabs.
Settlement had been continuous
from the Virginia coastline,
the Massachusetts coastline,
even across the Mississippi.
Then you run into this arid region,
from the edge of the
great plains till you get
to the rainy side of the
mountains in Oregon.
And so in the 1830s, the settlement has
to make this big jump if you're gonna,
if you're farmers looking for land.
This is the green place beyond
the great American desert
where if you can just get there,
there's a possibility of a life ahead.
Oregon country stretches
from the continental
divide to the pacific coast,
and from the northern edge
of California all the way up to Alaska.
Britain and america both lay claim
to the region simply
for having explored it.
In 1792, fur trader Robert
gray was the first American
to navigate into the Columbia river,
which he named after his ship.
Britain traces its claim to the voyage
of captain James cook, who
sailed to Vancouver in 1778,
but after the two nations
clash in the war of 1812,
neither side wants to fight again.
And so in 1818, they agree
to jointly occupy the pacific northwest.
The British have a much
bigger settlement imprint
on the west coast.
The Hudson bay company was one
of these Canadian fur companies
that has a fairly elaborate infrastructure
in the Oregon country.
The us doesn't have much at all.
There was this national incentive
to put Americans on the ground there.
If the place fills up with Americans,
then the United States is
gonna have a better claim
than the British.
The first men to arrive in Oregon country
are explorers, trappers, and traders.
They send back stories of fertile lands,
rich and natural resources.
You could get land cheap in the west,
and you could get land in Oregon free.
You could just go out there and claim it,
because Americans at
that time did not recognize
that the native American
peoples living on any territory
had title to the land.
The expansive land that was known
to our people was millions
of acres from the source
of the Columbia river in
British Columbia to the ocean.
We're the only people in that landscape
who have been residents
for more than 10,000 years.
For Americans, the most direct route
to the pacific coast
is an arduous journey.
Over land across two mountain ranges.
Do you have the
courage to make the trip?
But then the missionaries begin to arrive.
There's a series of
events toward the end
of the first third of the 19th century.
It's called the second great awakening.
It's the revival of
Evangelical christianity,
a belief in the literal
veracity of the gospels
and the Bible, but also a call
to bring others to the Christian faith.
It really inflames a lot of individuals,
and you're excited to
take all of this fervor,
all this fire, all this passion,
and disseminate the
word into foreign lands,
and at that particular time,
foreign land was anything
west of the Mississippi.
The whole idea is to convert the Indians.
Now, if in fact they also
facilitate the settlement
of Oregon by other white
people, I mean that's good too.
Missionaries are hearing a story that,
to them, is so delicious.
They hear that four Indians
from the pacific northwest
traveled to St. Louis
to get more information
about christianity.
If somebody says,
"bring the gospel to us,"
how, as a good Evangelical
Christian, how can you say no?
We weren't looking for a different god.
We were looking for the
source of the white men's power
that allowed them to
have these technologies
that we did not have, their
guns and their metal kettles
and their steel traps, you name it.
The christians mistakenly believe
that the native visitors
speak for all indigenous people
of the pacific northwest.
The call to mission sounds
out across the eastern states.
For Narcissa prentiss, a young
woman in upstate New York,
it strikes a chord.
She leads revivals, she
teaches Sunday school,
and so she becomes
very dedicated to the idea
that a missionary vocation
is really the right thing for her.
She writes a letter requesting support
from the church mission board.
The American board of
commissioners for foreign missions
would gather money to
support protestant missions
to spread the gospel abroad,
but also in the American
west on the frontier.
In 1836, women had
so few rights in america.
They could not own
property if they were married.
They could not write a legal contract,
and the most important
thing is they could not vote,
which meant that they
couldn't change their lot in life.
This is why it's so
incredible that Narcissa,
as a single woman, was planning to go
by herself over to Oregon.
The missionary board tells Narcissa
they will not send a
woman into Indian country
unless she is married.
Marcus Whitman is a 32-year-old doctor
in upstate New York.
He is an Evangelical Christian.
But he's bored by being a doctor.
There's no excitement in it.
He applies to the
American missionary board,
and they're not too keen on
sending him out as a single man.
And so they encourage
him to get married,
and he finds a suitable
candidate in the figure
of Narcissa prentiss.
You need a husband, I need a wife.
And so they get
together, they get married,
and then they present
themselves to the mission board.
And the mission board
at this point can't say no.
It's a 3,000 mile journey
to Oregon country.
The day after their wedding,
Marcus and Narcissa leave the comfort
and safety of western New York,
and travel to Liberty, Missouri,
a town on the western
edge of American settlement.
They had to go by horse and wagon,
and then they had to go by canal barges,
move sometimes on sleighs,
and then when the horse
and wagon didn't work,
they'd have to walk.
They're subject to the heat
and the rain and the snow.
It's incomprehensible.
Narcissa kept a journal of her travels.
I think I shall endure the journey well,
perhaps better than any of the rest of us.
It seems to me now that we
are on the very borders of civilization.
They go with another couple,
reverend Henry spalding
and his wife Eliza.
It's a seven-month journey.
In the early 1830s,
there really wasn't much
of a trail to Oregon.
It was a trapper's trail. You
couldn't get a wagon over it.
And so it was really a
tough, tough journey.
Marcus Whitman
recognizes that the only way
that Christian civilization as he perceives
is gonna be planted in Oregon is,
and this is crucial, when you
can get women to come out,
because if it's just the fur traders,
if it's just the explorers,
they don't create a settled society.
So Marcus Whitman
gets it in his head he
is going to find a wagon road.
The wagon was considered crucial,
because a wagon was
the moving Van of its era.
Just imagine how
difficult it would be to go
to Oregon in a cart.
But if this delicate example
of American female virtue
could do it, I guess the door's open.
So the people who become
missionaries, first of all,
they're utterly convinced
of the importance
of what it is they're doing.
So this can give them
courage to do things
that most people don't do,
because with this mindset,
when you encounter some
dangerous situation, say,
what's the worst that can happen to me?
I'll get killed. I'll die and go to heaven.
Traveling along traditional native trails,
missionaries Narcissa and
Marcus Whitman slowly traverse
the great plains on their
way to Oregon country.
Narcissa's view of what was in store
for her was really very idyllic.
She didn't imagine traveling by wagon.
There's no shocks, and you
are jostled from pillar to post.
It can be hot, it can be
cold, it can be raining,
it can be thundering, it can be lightning.
You can be smashing through
ruts, over rocks, over stumps.
It goes on and on and on.
Since we have been here,
we have made our tent
large enough for us all
to sleep under, quite a little family.
One of the great ironies is that Marcus
and Narcissa Whitman travel west,
along with Henry spalding,
a man Narcissa had rejected
in a proposal of marriage,
and he's sleeping in the same tent
with the whitmans on their honeymoon,
a time when they
conceived their only child.
Pregnancy on that trip was one
of the most dangerous things
that could happen to you.
There's no stopping for you
if you have morning sickness.
There's no stopping for you
if you have a miscarriage.
And so that's the kind of thing
that creates extra pressures
for women on these
long, long migrations.
The whitmans and the spaldings
cross the rocky mountains
by way of the south pass,
a route favored by the shoshone people.
In July of 1836, Narcissa
and Eliza become the
first American women
to make this journey
over the continental divide.
As they travel west, they
meet for a rendezvous
in what is now Wyoming.
It's south pass in the rockies.
Once a year,
miles from the edge
of American settlement,
a temporary city Springs up,
populated by French, British
and American fur trappers and traders,
and hundreds of native
Americans from across the plains.
These rendezvous are where
all these independent
fur trappers show up.
You know, drinking, gambling, fighting,
whoring, the whole thing.
You can imagine with some
missionaries showing up
at a rendezvous, their
mouths must have dropped
in utter shock to see what went on.
At the rendezvous,
Narcissa befriends a legendary
mountain man named Joe meek.
Mountain men like Joe meek
could help tell the whitmans where to go,
how to get there, give
them local knowledge.
And so the mountain men
became a very important link
between the tribes and
the settlers who came.
As they approach Oregon country,
the missionaries find their path
is more treacherous than ever.
Before noon, we began to descend one
of the most terrible
mountains for steepness
and length I have yet seen.
It was like winding stairs in its descent,
and in some places,
almost perpendicular.
Once they reach the blue mountains
in Oregon country, they are
forced to abandon their wagons
and continue on horseback.
And finally, after almost
200 days on the road,
they get their first glimpse of
what will be their new home.
They're exhausted, they're
running low on provisions,
and they come over the crest
of the last mountain range,
and they look down and they
have this great sense of relief.
We've made it.
It must have been absolutely amazing
after such an arduous
journey, and realizing that this
is where you're gonna have your baby,
and you're thinking to yourself,
"I've come to bring
the light of true religion,
and the sun will shine on my efforts."
And you might not be right.
In the fall of 1836, Marcus
and Narcissa settle in the foothills
of the blue mountains near walla walla.
Henry spalding squabbles
almost the entire trip
with Marcus Whitman.
And when they arrive
in the pacific northwest,
they really can't stand each other,
and they decide to live 120 miles apart.
The spaldings settle
among the Nez Perce
in the lapwai valley.
Meanwhile, Narcissa and
Marcus make their home
near the cayuse, four
days away by horseback.
The Nez Perce warn
the white missionaries
that it's probably dangerous
to live among the cayuse.
For one thing, it's very
dangerous for a doctor,
'cause the cayuse have
this longstanding tradition
of killing medicine men who fail.
For the cayuse, like
many native peoples,
medicine man is a sacred practice.
When you can't deliver results,
the cayuse demand justice,
and the penalty for that is death.
Despite the warnings they
receive about the cayuse,
the whitmans embrace
their missionary work.
Marcus builds the mission
with several hired hands from
the Hudson's bay company.
They call it waiilatpu,
in the cayuse language,
the place of the rye grass.
Funded by the missionary
board in the east,
it will include a mission
house, a school, and a farm.
Narcissa gives birth to her daughter Alice
in march of 1837, just
about five, six months
after they set up
housekeeping at their mission.
Narcissa is thrilled when
she welcomes her little girl
into the world, and so is Marcus.
Now we have a child
born in the promised land.
At the mission in the early days,
the whitmans have good
relations with the cayuse.
The local chief, or head
man, his name is tiloukaikt,
is seen as a benevolent,
a sort of a kind uncle.
He comes to see little Alice,
and in general, the reception
for the whole family is very hopeful.
Tiloukaikt gave her an Indian name,
called her cayuse girl.
That's how it translated.
And he calls her that
because she is a sign to us
that we will have good times
ahead, good fortune ahead.
We have young children,
they have young children,
and it is a family now.
Unlike the fur trappers
who came before them,
the whitmans want to change the way
the cayuse live and what they believe.
So for indigenous people,
christianity wasn't
necessarily a threat initially,
because it's like, the great spirit,
well, that kind of makes sense,
and we'll incorporate
that into our belief systems
until it doesn't work for us anymore.
When the whitmans arrive,
they think their ways have
to be followed before the
native Americans can be saved.
So that involves settling
down, becoming farmers,
cutting their hair, stop
dancing, stop gambling.
They want us to give up the way of life
that has sustained us for
more than 10,000 years.
The expectation is that we
should be as much like them
as possible in all factors of our life.
We should be prim and proper.
We should not travel to gather our foods.
We should stay in one
place and grow our foods.
We should not take up with the trappers
and traders in the way that we have,
and everything they want us
to change is not in our nature.
Life at the mission settles
into a routine of work
and worship, until one
day, tragedy strikes.
The worst possible thing happens
when Alice is not quite three years old.
Marcus and Narcissa don't notice
that their daughter has wandered away.
So Alice is on her own,
and she's playing at the water
before anybody realizes
that they haven't seen
her for a few minutes.
And the alarm is raised
that Alice is missing,
and everyone begins to look for her.
And that's when they find
that she has drowned
in the walla walla river.
The body is recovered
and it's brought back to the family.
Tiloukaikt has known
her since she was born.
She's special to him,
and he's very sad to present
this little girl to her mother.
The loss of her daughter changes her.
Her moroseness characterizes
her relationship more
and more with our people.
Narcissa becomes very
annoyed with the fact
that the cayuse come
and go from the compound,
come and go out of her home
when she was despondent
and would rather just be to
herself and deal with her grief.
To make matters worse,
the whitmans are failing
to convert the cayuse.
Marcus and Narcissa
Whitman only manage
to baptize two people in the entire time
that they are running this mission.
Two.
Meanwhile, the spaldings are having
more success with the Nez Perce.
The competition between Henry
and Marcus sours into a bitter rivalry.
They don't like each
other, they're jealous.
They write tattling letters
back to the board in Boston.
And these letters, there
are hundreds of these letters,
in fact, most of them
tattling on each other.
They're behaving in
a most UN-Christian,
UN-adult kind of way.
And so the board finally decides,
we're gonna pull the plug.
But Marcus refuses to accept
the mission board's decision.
With winter fast approaching,
he leaves Narcissa in October of 1842,
and begins the 3,000
mile journey back east
to plead his case in person.
Setting out from Oregon country,
late in the fall of 1842,
missionary Marcus
Whitman makes his way east
across the continent.
At the end of a harrowing
six-month journey,
he arrives in Boston
in threadbare clothes
and throws himself on the
mercy of the mission board.
They give him one last chance.
Whitman returns from
Boston by way of St. Louis,
and in St. Louis, there is
a large wagon train formed.
He didn't organize it,
but he ends up becoming
its defacto head man.
He shows them that wagons
can, in fact, cross the rockies
and several hundred
American settlers come.
It opens the way for
almost exponential growth.
Seven years have passed since Marcus
first set off for Oregon country.
This time he is one of
the many making the trek.
In 1843, more than a
thousand Americans
are bound for Oregon country.
Economic conditions in
the east are driving more
and more Americans into the west.
There's a financial panic
in 1837 that throws a lot
of people out of work,
and people in the east,
for whom life wasn't going so well,
they always thought they
could start over again in the west.
Much has changed since
the Whitman's first trip.
Back then, Marcus had been
forced to abandon his wagon
when the trail became
too rocky and narrow.
But the trail has been
widened and extended
by Narcissa's friend
from the rendezvous,
mountain man Joe meek.
Now wagon trains can make
their way over the blue mountains
past the Whitman mission,
and further west
toward the pacific coast.
Joe meek's path becomes the last leg
of the legendary Oregon trail.
Most of these Americans who head west
are utterly clueless about
how big this continent is,
and utterly shocked
when they get out there.
There are people who are
trying to carry their furniture,
and eventually, the
Oregon trail becomes littered
with dining room sets, and
pianos, and rocking chairs,
and all sorts of things
that these eastern settlers
think they're gonna take
with them on this westward journey.
They encounter great difficulties,
but they're gonna get
there no matter what.
When families go west, then you know
that the western settlement is serious.
In late September 1843,
Marcus returns to Oregon country.
After more than a year apart,
Narcissa and her husband are reunited.
The great migration
gives them a new purpose.
Turning their attention
away from the cayuse,
they focus on supporting new migrants
who stop off at the mission on their way
to the fertile lands of the
willamette valley to the west.
Often when settlers traveled west,
they lost family members, parents died,
and children were left orphans,
and the whitmans took them in.
Narcissa Whitman recognizes
she's not gonna be
converting native people,
and so she says, "I realize that I have"
to focus my efforts on
trying to bring the light
of the true religion to the
white people around me.
The influx of migrants strengthens
the america's hold on the pacific coast.
Although it is still jointly
occupied with Great Britain,
Oregon figures more and more
into america's dreams for the future,
and becomes a key part
of James polk's campaign
for president in 1844.
So James polk runs
for president on an
overtly expansionist ticket,
and he says, "we're
gonna claim all of Oregon."
After polk is elected,
Great Britain gives
into pressure by the us
and signs a treaty in 1846,
dividing Oregon country
between them at the 49th parallel.
Great Britain understood
that the sheer juggernaut
of American intention, and
willpower, and manpower,
and economic power was
going to make it impossible
for them really to maintain any claims
to Oregon without a war,
and they didn't want to fight that war.
The treaty gives the
British everything north
of the 49th parallel, plus
the island of Vancouver,
while the us gets the southern part
of Oregon country, gaining
18.5 million acres of new land
and their first piece of the pacific coast.
But the American part of
Oregon remains unorganized
with no federal presence
and no formal government.
In the case of Oregon,
the settlers went ahead of government,
and then government
came along afterwards.
And so more people come the next year,
and more people
come the year after that.
And so the Oregon trail
then becomes the highway to Oregon.
The numbers go from like
250 one year to 1,000 one year,
to 4,000 the next year, to 7,000.
They're starting to outnumber
the indigenous people
of the region very quickly,
and the cayuse see the transformation,
and they don't like it.
Among the many newcomers
at the Whitman mission in
1847 is a man named Joe Lewis.
He is of mixed blood, part
French Canadian, part native.
He brings a stark warning for the cayuse.
Around the country,
native people have lost their lands.
They have been wiped out.
They have been killed off.
Over the previous decade and a half,
around a hundred thousand
American Indians east
of the Mississippi have
been forcibly displaced
under president Andrew
Jackson's Indian removal act.
American settlers have taken
their lands for themselves.
This news from Joe
Lewis alarms the cayuse.
With Oregon now controlled
by the United States,
they fear that settlers
will soon take their land.
Then in the fall of 1847,
an outbreak of measles tears
through the pacific northwest.
White settlers contract the virus,
but many of them
have natural resistance.
The cayuse and other
native Americans do not.
Our ways of healing are not working.
Dr. Whitman's are not working
when they're burying two,
four, and six people a day.
Whitman didn't understand
how measles worked.
His favorite prescription
was to bleed people
who were sick, which made them sicker.
He didn't really know what else to do.
Eventually disease will
kill nearly half the cayuse,
hitting their children hardest of all.
Marcus Whitman is not
able to save our people.
He's warned many
times. Among the cayuse,
if you practice bad medicine,
you could pay with your life.
In November of 1847,
Marcus Whitman fires
Joe Lewis from the mission
where he'd been employed as a laborer.
Lewis starts to spread
a pernicious rumor
that the whitmans are
poisoning the cayuse
so they can steal their land.
If you're one of the
Indians, you're thinking,
"boy, not only are they
affronting our beliefs,
but they're killing us."
Friendly cayuse warn Marcus
that his life is now in danger.
But for reasons having to
do with the stubborn nature
of Marcus Whitman
and his sense of destiny,
Whitman will not leave.
On November 29th,
1847, it all comes to a head.
That morning there was a
funeral for three cayuse children,
all victims of measles.
Among the dead children is the son
of the local leader tiloukaikt.
It is his third child to
die from the measles.
After the funeral, Marcus
and Narcissa receive
some visitors at the mission.
More than a dozen cayuse
men gather outside their door.
He admits two or three cayuse warriors,
including tiloukaikt and
another warrior named tomahas
to this mission house.
I'm sure he sensed
something was amiss,
and so he helps to get Narcissa
out of there with the child.
They engage him in conversation.
And they are there asking
Dr. Whitman about medicine.
And what they wanted to
show was that he had poisons
in his medicines.
And according to witnesses,
tomahas hits Whitman in the back
of the head with a tomahawk,
knocking him to the ground
and cracking his skull.
He's then shot in the neck.
Narcissa goes to the window to look out
and see what's happening,
and she's shot in the shoulder.
The cayuse are not going
to abandon their mission
to get rid of the whitmans.
They're able to get Mrs. Whitman
on a settee and carry it out.
Joe Lewis is one of the
carriers of that piece of furniture.
She's thrown off the settee
that she was carried out on into the mud.
She's shot, she's hacked, she's whipped,
and she dies in the mud.
When our young men decided
that the whitmans' lives should end,
they didn't realize it would bring down
on us thunder from the east
that we could not have imagined.
After killing the whitmans,
the cayuse continue their slaughter,
killing 11 more white settlers
who are living at the mission.
When word of the massacre
reaches the willamette valley,
it causes rage and a
desire for vengeance.
The white people create
a militia to go to war.
The settlers want protection
from the federal government,
and they send Joe meek
to Washington to ask for it.
Meek makes the case that
in order to defend the lives
of American citizens,
the Oregon country needs
to become a us territory.
In August of 1848,
Oregon officially becomes a
territory of the United States.
600 federal riflemen are
sent west to hunt for the killers.
They send out a governor,
they send out the military.
It's open season on Indians
in the Oregon territory.
The ensuing conflict will come
to be known as the cayuse war.
The native side suffers
devastating losses.
Finally, after two years, in April of 1850,
five men turn themselves
in to stop the bloodshed.
Joe Lewis is not among these
volunteers, but tiloukaikt is.
They make statements, depositions,
and tiloukaikt says,
"did not Christ die to save his people?
So I die. We die to save our people."
The so-called cayuse five
are transported to Oregon city
and hastily tried for murder in a tavern,
a jury of white settlers
hands down a guilty verdict
and a death sentence.
Maybe half of all the white people
in the willamette valley come to watch it.
The five men who were
hanged in Oregon city,
we're still looking for their graves,
because we'd like to bring them home.
In 1855, just 50 years
after first welcoming American
explorers to the region,
the cayuse are forced to sign a treaty.
The terms are harsh.
They must give up their vast homeland
of over 6.4 million acres
and move onto a
245,000-acre reservation
shared with other tribes.
The lands they surrender
are given to American settlers.
In 1859, Oregon becomes
the 33rd state in the union.
Henry spalding, after
the death of his rival,
Marcus Whitman, becomes a
one-man propaganda machine,
and he essentially
invents the Whitman legend
for American history.
Whitman is credited
with getting the Oregon
country for the United States.
Spalding sends articles
to religious newspapers,
and eventually persuades the us senate
to publish his account
of Whitman's heroism,
elevating himself in the process.
And Marcus Whitman goes
from being a failed anonymous guy
who got killed to a Christ-like figure
who sacrificed his blood
so Oregon could live.
The killing of the whitmans
fails to stop the flood of immigrants
to the rich farmlands of Oregon.
From the 1840s through the 1860s,
over 400,000 people travel
west along the Oregon trail.
It was the greatest folk
migration in American history.
At some points, there were as many
as 12 wagons abreast
growing across this country.
So many people come
to the willamette valley
that they actually carve a
cut through the mountains
and across the prairies
that can be seen still from satellites.
The epic migration
continues by foot, by cart,
by mule, and by wagon
until the transcontinental
railroad offers travelers
a gentler way to go west.
Oregon is changed forever.
Where the cayuse once
gathered food and hunted game
and where the mountain men
once trapped animals for trade,
the varied landscape is now supplanted
by settlements and farms.
And so there is a kind of transition
from an extraction economy of furs,
and now moving into
an agrarian economy
in the pacific northwest.
We accept that our homeland
is the homeland of many people now.
Our elders always tell us there's good
and bad in everything that happens.
You have to look at both.
Of the thousand Americans
that follow the whitmans to Oregon,
few will see their deaths as
anything other than a massacre.
But their story is emblematic of a pattern
that repeats across the American west,
settlers using native
resistance as an excuse
to seize their homelands,
and just as they did in Oregon,
land-hungry settlers will push into Texas
and turn a raid on one pioneer family
into a long and bloody war,
fought against the most
powerful native force
on the continent, the comanche empire.