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Before Little Shoot found my husband, bringing him to me, I had written and posted a letter to my father telling him that we’d arrived, that all was well, and that he ought to consider bringing cattle and coming too. It was not too late in the season. It was an impulsive act taken within my waiting. I hadn’t known when I wrote it whether Mr. Warren had gone on ahead, if something had happened to him, or what Touchet would offer, but I felt a confidence that we could make it through if we needed to. And having my sisters near would be a pleasure as well as a help.

The cattle caught up with us, bellowing and shaking their bovine heads of flies. We followed them, continuing our journey east. For most of the trip, we trudged beside the oxen away from the river to ridges high above the Columbia. The views were majestic. Copses of timber dotted the horizon, fading to rounded hills, the grasses turning brown from the hot sun but still majestic, like waves of amber. Then down steep, rocky trails, back toward water, crossing the Deschutes and then the John Day flowing into the Columbia. “John Day’s River.” Mr. Warren chewed on a long grass as he nodded toward the slow-moving stream. “Named by the Astor party. I guess the Virginian had gone mad on the passage west. They had a hard time. Got here in January and he was nearly skinned alive by In—” He stopped himself. “Never mind. It’s a pretty river, isn’t it?”

“Is the Touchet as large?”

He shook his head. “But it’ll be good for transport. Feeds into the Walla Walla River and that into the Columbia. And the grasses, see how tall they are on either side of the John Day? We’ll have that kind of grass at Touchet.”

A wheel broke on the wagon while the faithful oxen pulled us up rolling ridges high above the Columbia. Timber, green, didn’t make a good repair, but we managed, getting ourselves moving again. Often, I carried the goading stick, Lizzie in a quilt on my back, America Jane on a long rope to keep her from wandering away. I walked beside the wagon, and Mr. Warren rode ahead to be with the drovers, keeping us far enough back to be out of the cattle dust but close enough to be of help if they should get spooked and stampede.

None of that happened and grateful I was.

When we rolled down and crossed the Walla Walla to arrive at the fort, I was ready for a night on a bed of feathers instead of on the ground. I had not been to the fort since we’d been taken there first after the hostage negotiations were completed. I heard the iron hinges grate as the gate opened.

Clunk!
Gates close behind us. We are safe. A woman, not a hostage, an Indian, comes to me and I shrink until her soft words are spoken in Sahaptin. I stare at her, tell her my name.

“Spalding,” she says and claps her hands together, the movement and sound a startle. “Your father, here.”

“
Papo
?”

My father steps out of the guardhouse, his eyes searching until he finds mine. “Spalding!” the Nimíipuu woman says then and she reaches for my hand to lead me toward him, but I run, run into his arms. “
Papo, Papo,
you are safe. You are safe.”

His tears mingle with mine as he bends to hold me. “Eliza, oh, my child. We are all safe. We are all well. Your mother, she will be better when she sees your face. Thank God, thank God.”

“She is alive?”
My mother lives!
I search the adult faces looking at us, their eyes glassy with tears at the sight of our arrival.

“She’s at Fort Vancouver. Your brother and sisters. We’ll join them.”

“We won’t go back to Lapwai?” My dolls, my books, all left behind.

“We can’t.” His words falter. “We’ll be together. Just not in Lapwai. We are here. Safe. At this fort.” The happy sounds of other reunions, the cries of joy begin the disheveling of terror.

“’Liza, are you all right?” Mr. Warren sounds concerned, his voice pulls me back.

“What? Yes. I . . . I think so.” Twelve years later, I’m facing old, cold memories as hard as the iron on the fort’s gate.

“Everything is so strange. It’s as though it’s a different fort.”

“I suspect it is.” Mr. Warren removed his hat and rubbed his forearm to his sweaty brow. A red rim marked the hat’s residence. “This fort was built in ’56, for soldiers in the Indian Wars. The one you remember, it was abandoned. We’re downriver from where that one stood. Don’t you remember?”

“I—how could I forget?” My limbs shook and I reached for the oxen, steadying myself against the warm body. I’d been anticipating how I’d feel about that fort, all its memories. But the physical space of it was no more. We’d traveled right past it. My memory kept secrets from me.

“We’ll let the soldiers know we’re in the territory but move on. Not far from Touchet now.”

I nodded, gathering my thoughts. I had returned to a time, a reunion, that didn’t happen where I’d thought. I was discovering that the past I remembered wasn’t always the past that was.

The Diary of Eliza Spalding

1850

Between the stories I remember of Lapwai and the facts of how it really was lies memory. How to separate one from the other? In my fading I remember the good times. Matilda speaking in English about Jesus. Eliza laughing as Mustups, a Nimíipuu boy, pulls her in a cart made of a fir round. Henry Hart catching frogs along the Clearwater. My little girls born healthy. A day before my daughter went off to school when we rode alone. She found an iris. Or was it some other bloom? Oh how I wish to return.

Before we were invited to Kirk’s Ferry, known as Brownsville now, and S became obsessed with the trial, I thought we could have just gone back to Lapwai. Things had settled down there and I missed The People so. Matilda could have nursed me back to health, taken care of the children. That place of the butterflies was where we’d been called to by God. But Henry insisted we could not return without the sanction of the Mission Board. “Why not?” I asked. “The Board don’t understand that the Indians are different in different places. Our Nimíipuu want us back. We could return and do our work without the Mission’s support, show them what we can still accomplish there. Take the remnants of what was left and build something new with them. Be as homesteaders are, building up a claim with our neighbor’s help.”

“We accepted a call from the Board,” S insisted. “Your logic does not enter in.”

“We accepted a call from God. And circumstances have changed. Aren’t we compelled to change with them?”

“You do not remember the difficulties we had there. And without the Board’s support, there would be grave tensions. Not all want us back. Some have lost the faith.”

I remembered our lives as good there, full of challenges but rich in present moments, small gifts of living. “Are we not meant to forget past difficulties except to learn from them, to take more informed stands to better serve? Do you not remember Philippians 4:8?” I quoted for him, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

He shook his head. “I will write another letter.”

I remembered then just how stubborn S could be. Henry ranted about the Catholics, then, about their part in the uprising, which to my way of thinking was nothing, they’d only just arrived. He raved about justice that seemed of vengeance to me. And I wondered then if this man had broken his mind, if all the trauma of the years had taken him from me, this man who was so far from the man I had married. I hope I live long enough to learn from our trials, to gain from past lessons.

22
Segments of the Past

How, when I was so grateful to have seen my father after the rescue, could such dissension live between us? Had my father always been so stubborn? How did my mother handle that? I had made overtures to him. Yet I had willingly gone away while our disagreement broiled. He’d say I am the cause of our separation, having left my home to marry Mr. Warren those years before. But aren’t children allowed to make their own way without their parents always hovering? How would I learn from my mistakes if I made none? I didn’t think my marrying was a mistake, though there had been moments. Maybe my mother had those moments too. I wondered how she wove them into the gracious, loving woman I so missed.

Another thirty miles beyond the fort and we entered the Touchet River valley. And oh, the grass! It was just as Mr. Warren had described. We watched as the cattle meandered down the ridge to the river, then disappeared in the meadow, their beige
backs like raw potato slices among a sea of mustard greens. Their big heads and long horns pushed the grasses aside, the sun spattering across the horns like flickering firelight. They spread out, the nearly three hundred he’d begun with. “No small feat,” he told me. “If I ever need a job, I can drive cattle across the mountains.”

“You have employment,” I said. “Taking care of your family.”

“And my cows.”

I was happy to see him happy.

Near the river, the land flattened out more, and in the shade of cottonwood trees and with a view of willow bushes, we set our tent. Our life began anew.

“In years to come,” Mr. Warren dreamed aloud for me, “the cattle will graze on the upper hills that rise one thousand feet above us, I’d guess. We’ll plant wheat there. Here, the grass will sustain those beeves and us as well.”

We had the river for water and the bounty of the land on which to build his dream.

And we had each other.

We stayed in the tent for several weeks while the drovers constructed the log house we would eventually move into. A lean-to off the main cabin would one day be a bunk room for the three drovers, from California, they said. They had worked cattle before the Catholic missions closed there. They spoke another language among the three of them, Spanish. I thought I’d learn it too.

The building came slowly, as the men rode out every few days to keep the cattle from wandering into the next territory. I was alone with my daughters then. I found time to write, hoping for a wagon to take my letter west to family. I hadn’t heard back from my father after telling him the cattle had made it over the pass nor of my invitation for them to join us. I knew that not
far away, about eleven miles, were the remains of Waiilatpu, and I knew that one day I would go there. Perhaps at last to say good-bye to the teacher, Mr. Rogers, whom we all loved; to the Whitmans, whom I adored as well, especially Mrs. Whitman. Mrs. Whitman had treated us white children with such care.

I’d gotten the drovers—Jose, Romano, and a man we called “Pet” to build a willow fence around the yard that the sheep kept clipped but also to keep the children away from the river. Mrs. Whitman’s grief began when her little Alice drowned living close to a rushing stream. I didn’t want to lose a child to the Touchet. I remembered at Lapwai looking for the Littlejohns’ boy and hearing horrified screams as his mother and mine searched for him along the Clearwater; crying as the Nez Perce divers pulled his body out in the late afternoon. We’d had a fence at Lapwai. I made sure this one would keep my girls in.