The Whitman Massacre Perspectives: Part 3, The Cayuse (Native Americans)

Welcome back to Myths & Mischief! This is your Lovable Lord of Lore, today’s mischievous myth is the third in a series of five involving different perspectives about the events surrounding the Whitman Massacre which started the path to statehood for Washington.

The Cayuse (Native Americans)

While we are not known for being peaceful, we also do not seek trouble. We are set in our traditions and are proud of who we are and how we have lived. Our land expands to the north and runs over a thousand of miles to the South. We are a nomadic people who believe that our lifestyle celebrates the freedom in this land. The trouble started when these people showed up. They started putting buildings on our land. We let them do it because they were not threatening us, and seemed to want a good relationship. They had us over for many meals and had us practice their bizarre customs. They would sing to us these horrible songs and showed us pictures of their spiritual power.

Their language made it difficult to communicate with them. After the entertainment aspect of our relationship wore off, we wanted to return to our lives as they had been. After years of mysterious diseases, we need to ensure our survival, and our way of life. What they call small pox, has devastated the native population. We were just starting to recover when these people came.

The earth provided these people with enough food for them and plenty to spare, so we helped ourselves whenever food was scarce. These people made a lot of noise about something, which we felt was strange considering they were on our land. The woman seems to be especially hostile and angry with us. She speaks as though she is better than us and we are merely children in her eyes.

The man in charge poisoned some of the food that the earth had provided for all. He is acting as if he is in charge of who lives or dies here and has dishonored our spirits. He is walking a treacherous path since the Cayuse have so many powerful spirits guiding us. We told him of his lapse of judgment and demanded that he pay us for the use of the land. It is inconceivable that a person would poison perfectly good food while others go hungry. This is not the kind of person we want as neighbor. It even sounded like they were blaming us for the death of his daughter.

We think he has upset too many spirits by poisoning the food and their evil ways are coming back to haunt them. Finally, they are understanding that we want them to leave. The man in charge left in the middle of the night with only the woman and a few others left behind. I have to admit it is fun convincing her to leave. We would sneak up in the middle of the night and bang on their buildings. We make the calls of various predators and throw things on their roofs. It is pretty amusing. We all joked around about it when we got home.

They deserve it, after all it is our land and they are so demeaning. That woman finally left. Now things can return to normal and we are rid of those crazy people once and for all.

That man went to get reinforcements. We were sure they left for good but he came back with a thousand people. He did not even have the integrity to admit his mistakes and now he threatens us with all of these people. It turns out they also brought with them many illnesses. We have little choice but to go to this man for help, he has been serving as our medicine man. When many had died, we gave him a test. We sent two sick Cayuse and one that was not sick. The medicine man treated all of them, and all of them died, even the healthy one. We even had information from in insider that told us this man was using poison, not medicine with the Cayuse.

We have seen the new people recover from the same illnesses. Perhaps this is part of his plan, appear to make himself useful. He is killing us. We have lost half of our population. Every day we see the settlers getting better and more and more of us are dying. He is doing nothing to help us. It is our tradition to treat medicine men in a certain way. It was his desire to serve us in this way, so we must treat him accordingly. Since he has failed as a medicine man, we need to rid our land of his weak spirit so that we can stop our people from dying.

A group of us rode over to their buildings and followed through with our traditions. We killed the men and that horrid woman to rid the land of their poisonous spirits and we took the women and children and brought them to a mission away from our land. The trek was harder than we anticipated, a few of the children died on the way. We felt terrible, but we were trying to get them to their people.

This has aggravated a great many people, but they should consider we were acting appropriately. Some of the men from the mountains began attacking us. They would come after us relentlessly and for no good reason. We would fight back in self-defense. More and more people were coming after us until finally a meeting was called. They said that if we turn over the people responsible for the killing of the the medicine man and the other people, then they would get a chance to explain their actions and people would stop attacking us. We sent five people to go set things straight. When they were hung, we figured out what we were dealing with and have had to fight for our existence ever since.

The warriors from all over the East side of the land gathered in their uniforms by the thousands and hunted us down. We are left with so few choices and there seems to be no reasoning behind the actions of the people that are coming into our land and taking away everything that is dear to us.

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Until next time, this is your Lovable Lord of Lore.

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