In Which I am Filmed, and Confront a Ghost

blah blah blah

So last Thursday I went down to Portland to be interviewed for a new interpretive film for Whitman Mission National Monument. My involvement with the project began back in January when I was contacted by a scriptwriter who was working up a treatment for the film. She had visited the monument and asked what to read and apparently someone handed her my book. We spoke on the phone two or three times. I was impressed by the thoughtfulness and research that were going into the production. So when they asked me to be one of the talking heads in the film I was happy to agree.

They sent me the questions in advance--seven pages of them! I discovered that there was a lot I had forgotten since my book came out in 2004. I wasn't sure how to prepare. For each question I tried to come up with a sound bite and a longer set of talking points. The filming was done at the Old Scots Church, a historic 1870s church outside of Portland. It is beautiful.

The filming was interesting and a new experience for me. In many ways it was like a conversation, except that periodically the interviewer would ask me to repeat something because a truck went by outside or because I looked at the camera. For the first couple of questions I gave my long answers, and was diplomatically asked if I couldn't be a bit more concise? So from there on I gave my sound bite answers and they seemed to like that. All in all it was probably a fairly standard interview--except for when it got strange.

Dear Reader, have I ever told you about the introduction of my book? My book is about religious change among Plateau Indians in the early contact period, ending with the deaths of missionaries Narcissa and Marcus Whitman in 1847. I open the book at the 1850 hanging of five Cayuse men who were convicted of the killings:

Joe Meek knew how to hang an Indian. The recently appointed Marshall of Oregon knew as much about the natives as any man in the territory. As a mountain man he had lived among Indians for most of his adult life. Meek traded with Indians, he played their games, shared their prayers, wintered in their lodges, and had taken not one but two native wives. He had killed Indians as well--sometimes as a member of a native war party, sometimes in self-defense, and sometimes for the fun and frivolity of killing. But as the fur trade faded in the 1840s, Meek abandoned the free life of the mountains and moved to the Willamette Valley to try his hand at farming. When the burgeoning American settlement there needed a law officer, Meek was only too glad to exchange his plow for a badge. As he climbed the gallows that day in 1850, Meek was turning his back on his old way of life and returning to the fold of American civilization.

It goes on from there and I am pretty hard on Meek. Anyway, during a break in the filming I went outside to take a walk in the little cemetery that was hard up against the church. It is very beautiful and full of Oregon pioneers:

I took only a few steps into the cemetery and who did I find? Joe Meek, in his resting place twenty-five feet from where I was interviewed:

How weird is that? What are the odds? A chill ran down my back. And I went back inside and did the rest of the interview--what else to do? That night I kept expecting a supernatural visitor, but apparently ghosts can't travel very far at night.

With Marcus and Narcissa to Pensacola

I just got work that my proposal has been accepted for the 2011 Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History Conference in Pensacola this April. I am excited because the NCPH is by miles the most interesting history conference and Pensacola sounds pretty nice as well. Here is the proposal I submitted:

The Many Deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman

The killings of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman cast a long shadow in the Pacific Northwest. Since the American missionaries died at the hands of their Cayuse charges in 1847, their deaths have been reinterpreted with each new generation according to its own needs and preconceptions. Today the landscape of south-central Washington and north-central Oregon hosts numerous and contradictory interpretations of the deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman--morality plays with different moral lessons.

My presentation will look at some of the different ways that this controversial historical event is and has been presented in monuments, museums, and other public places. In particular I will focus on three locales: Whitman Mission National Historic Site, established in 1936 and (despite considerable updating in recent years) devoted to the “heroic” interpretation of the missionary encounter; Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, established by the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes and where the Whitmans are presented as dangerous invaders and cultural imperialists; and Nez Perce National Historical Park, established in 1965 in a partnership between the National Park Service and the Nez Perce and other native peoples where the death of the Whitmans is presented in a more even-handed manner. I will briefly examine other public monuments to the Whitmans including sites such as Whitman College and the Marcus Whitman Hotel.

The presentation will be incorporate many images, sound clips, and video from the sites examined.

Charles Kuralt on the Road to the Whitman Massacre

Here is an interesting piece of video that came my way--a four-minute segment from Kuralt's "On the Road" series:


1976 Charles Kuralt "On the Road" Segment on the Whitmans. from Larry Cebula on Vimeo.

Charles Kuralt criss-crossed the nation for twenty-five years, producing his gentle homey On the Road segments for CBS News from forgotten towns far from the interstate. "Before there was Ira Glass, there was Charles Kuralt," wrote Seth Stevenson in Slate recently, and that is exactly right. As a boy I was always entranced by the far-flung places that Kuralt brought into our living room. Little did I know that he had his reasons for staying on the road so much--two separate families, each unaware of the other.

The segment seems to be from 1975 or 76 and was converted to video by the Washington State Archives in 2005. Kuralt tells the story the way it was traditionally told in that era--as a tragedy for the white missionaries who were savagely killed by the Indians. There is not much attempt to understand native motivations or the suffering and death that were experiencing at the time. And it propagates the idea that measles were spread to the Cayuse via white emigrants on the Oregon Trail--recent research shows that the Cayuse themselves brought the disease back from a cattle raid in California. Still it is a charming little piece.

Bonus: Hunter S. Thompson reading a letter to Charles Kuralt, after the jump:

Public History Has to Get the History Right

The explosion of digital technologies, falling prices for equipment, and the development of an online audience interested in history has allowed everyone to get into the business of public history. Anyone with a netbook and perhaps a Flip video camera can produce original history content, put it online via Blogger or Facebook or dozens of other free platforms, and publicize their wares with Twitter or listservs or whatever. But what good does this do us if they get their history wrong?

Exhibit A: This podcast on the Whitman Tragedy by what appears to be a one-man outfit, US History Travelcast. I very much admire what Jeff Linder, the author of this podcast series, is trying to do. His fledgling site has podcasts on topics as diverse as Plymouth Rock, Seth Bullock (of Deadwood fame), and a 1959 prison riot in Montana. Many of the topics are drawn from Linder's travels and his website includes photographs of many of the featured locations. Unfortunately the content, at least for this episode, is pretty weak.

The problem with Linder's podcast is that he tells the story of the Whitman Mission exactly the way historians of a hundred years ago told the story--of saintly missionaries who headed west and were murdered by superstitious (and faceless) Indians who did not know any better. Linder begins his story with the missionaries at their homes in the northeast, rather than with the Cayuse and Walla Walla peoples along the Columbia. He carefully recites the the full names of each missionary, while mentioning no native person by name until he drops the names of two of the individuals who killed the Whitmans. Indeed the first mention of Indians at all is when he says that the Whitman's joined a fur brigade for safety against "raiding bands of Indians." He repeats the idea that part of the importance of the missionaries is that their party included the "first white women over the Rockies," which is one of those racialized "firsts" that makes modern historians cringe.

The important back story to the mission--the fur trade, the native journey to Saint Louis, the religious changes before the Whitman's arrival--are absent. Linder has Lewis and Clark "discovering" the Columbia River, which would have been news to the American and English sea captains who had sailed up its mouth a generation earlier, let alone the native peoples who had lived there for a hundred generations. He repeats the old myth that a wagon train of immigrants gave measles to the Cayuse, an idea disproven by anthropologist Robert Boyd a decade ago. And Linder has the mixed bloods Joe Lewis and Nicolas Finley as instigators of the killings--a popular 19th century theory but one not widely accepted today.

In his introductory episode Linder explains that he was never interested in history until a recent visit to Washington D.C. where history really came alive to him. "I am not a historian," Linder explains, "I don't have a degree in history." And yet he does have a podcast about history, and his lack of historical training undermines his efforts.

I have spent too many words picking on this poor podcaster who wanted nothing more than to share his love of history.  Let me turn to the real culprit here--the historical profession, which has been slow to adopt new technologies and has left the digital path open to well-meaning but untrained amateurs. Most of us could easily create a podcast and some blog posts on some of our favorite topics. It isn't that hard. But we fail to embrace the new opportunities to reach a public that is hungry for history, and others fill the vacuum.

[Illustration: This diorama of the killing of the Whitman's used to be on display at Whitman Mission National Monument. It was eventually removed because of its factual inaccuracy and because it was offensive to the tribes. Photo courtesy of the Washington State Digital Archives.]