After the massacre, the settlers of the region sent a delegation to Washington, D.C., and used the massacre to motivate Congress to make the Oregon Country an official part of the United States, completing the continental nation, Harden said.
Prior to that, the region that became the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho had been jointly held with the British, Harden said.
“The killing of Whitman was the trigger that made Walla Walla part of the United States,” he said.
Twenty years after the massacre, fellow missionary Henry Spalding manufactured a false story about Whitman. Spalding contended Whitman had traveled to Washington, D.C., and “persuaded President (John) Tyler to stop the British plot to steal the Oregon Territory from the United States,” Harden said.
There is no evidence Whitman actually did this, Harden said.
But Spalding relentlessly promoted that story, and it became the popularly accepted myth, Harden said, printed in history books for decades. The myth was debunked in 1900 by a Yale professor and dropped from wide use.
Whitman’s name still adorns landmarks across the Pacific Northwest, including many schools, streets, a hotel in Walla Walla, a county in eastern Washington, a national forest in Oregon and a glacier on Mount Rainier.
In 1953 a heroic statue to Whitman was placed in Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., as one of two representing Washington state. He is standing, wearing buckskin garments and holding a thick Bible and saddlebags. Some people grumbled about the false story of Whitman’s achievements even then, Harden said.
Harden noted that Whitman College has taken concrete steps for decades to distance itself from the Whitman myth. That includes moving a statue identical to the one in Statuary Hall to a remote corner of campus. The college in 2016 voted to change its mascot from the Missionaries to the Blues, in honor of a nearby mountain range. There are no plans to change the name of the elite college.
Washington legislators had been working for several years to replace Whitman’s statue in Statuary Hall. This year they chose deceased Native American fishing and environmental activist Billy Frank Jr. for the honor.
The measure’s prime sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Debra Lekanoff, is the only Native American in the Washington Legislature. Her strategy was to praise Frank without criticizing Whitman, to avoid antagonizing supporters of the missionary.
Gov. Jay Inslee in April signed the bill, beginning the process of putting a statue of Frank in the U.S. Capitol.
“We expect to send our best from the state of Washington to be memorialized in the United States Capitol in Statuary Hall,” Inslee said at the bill signing ceremony. “We can’t send the Nisqually River or Mount Rainier, but we can send Billy Frank Jr.”
Meanwhile, Whitman students have been working to remove a Whitman statue from campus, including at an April demonstration.
Sophomore Gillian Brown told the school newspaper she was uncomfortable with the way the statue glorified Whitman’s legacy.
“Even when I first came to Whitman and they took us to the monument, I thought, ‘This guy is a colonizer. He’s not someone to be celebrated,’” Brown told the Whitman Wire.
The issue is still up in the air.
The campus statue is owned by the city of Walla Walla, college spokeswoman Gina Ohnstad said. The city is working on a process to allow residents to submit formal requests for the removal of public art.
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This story has been corrected to accurately spell Ohnstad.
This article originally appeared here.
