I enjoy comic books, and I collect comic books. A few years ago I reported in this space about a Classics Illustrated Special Edition, To The Stars! This is because that issue has a major feature on the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar, including creation of the glass disc in Corning in 1935.
There’s also an issue called Crossing the Rockies, which I’d never seen, but which I figured HAD to mention Marcus and Narcissa (Prentiss) Whitman. I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago and ordered a used copy available on Amazon.
And just about the whole first chapter, nineteen pages, is dedicated to the Whitmans.
So to tell the tale as the comic tells it… [with editorial comments from me in square brackets]…
The chapter’s entitled “The Oregon Trail,” and it opens with several Oregon Indians asking for missionaries. “The greatest of these missionaries was Doctor Marcus Whitman,” and he’s introduced in the third panel.
Whitman accompanies Reverend Samuel Parker to the far west, at first sneered at by mountain men when he falls sick. Before long, though, he’s nursing them through cholera and performing surgery on Jim Bridger, compelling the scoffers and scorners to change their tune.
Sent back east to recruit more settlers, he startles the folks in his home town of Rushville (who weren’t expecting him) by stalking into church in mountain-man mode, accompanied by two Indians. [This is the only area community actually named in the story. Rushville’s Marcus Whitman High School honors this native son.]
Whitman persuades four others to join him in Oregon, including Henry and Eliza Spalding and Narcissa Prentiss, whom he marries. [Marcus lived and doctored for a while in Wheeler, where a stone marker commemorates his stay. Narcissa and Bath-born Henry were from Prattsburgh, where they knew each other from town, church, and school. In fact, Narcissa had declined a marriage proposal from Henry – no clue how it affected the close-knit party knowing that Eliza was Henry’s second choice and Henry was Narcissa’s second choice. Franklin Academy has a monument to its famed alumni, and a plaque in Ithaca commemorates their commissioning service. The Narcissa Prentiss home is now a museum in Prattsburgh.]
Against all advice they take the women into the Great Prairie and up the Rocky Mountains; indeed, the women insist upon it, and carry on gamely with the men through snowstorms and raging rivers. After a 96-day trip they reach Walla Walla on September 1, 1836, hailed as the first white women to cross the continent. [Well, maybe. Seems to me it depends on how you slice it. Certainly Spanish-American and Mexican-American women had crossed in the Texas-New Mexico-Arizona-California region.]
Whitman returns to the east on business. When hard times combine with reports of a wonderful setting in Oregon, nearly a thousand emigrants itch to leave Missouri in 1843, and they hire the returning Marcus Whitman as their guide. No other wagon train has ever made the trip, but he wins them through, and within two years 4000 more have joined them.
This of course puts extreme pressure on the local Indians, who start to push back. Two panels straightforwardly tell how Cayuse Indians killed Marcus, Narcissa, and a dozen more on November 19, 1847. [All of which is factual. The story sticks to the facts, doesn’t make it too bloody, and does not portray the attacking Cayuse as savages.] Following this two Oregon men cross the continent to Washington and demand that the government provide for protection and organization in the territory, which soon comes to pass.
While the 1958 comic never questions the white “westward expansion,” it also does not demean the Indians. They all speak in full grammatical sentences, and they are not portrayed as bloodthirsty or unreasonable.
The Whitmans and the Spaldings were remarkable people – Marcus crossed the five times, under grave dangers and mostly on foot or horseback, in a day when most people never went twenty miles from their homes. He was a missionary, a doctor, a pioneer, and a developer… mixing up those roles may have contributed to his death. One thing he never dreamed of being was a comic book hero.