Studying Oregon's History III
Bill Long 7/21/06
The Protestant Ladder and Further Mission Documents
Once a student sees takes time to understand fully the Catholic Ladder something peculiar begins to happen in the mind of that student. S/he realizes that s/he can do history, that history is, when you take your time with it, quite fun and rather accessible to you. Such a project will make the student begin to long for more specific information when s/he studies other topics. It may well be that once a student has really done this topic well that s/he will never be content with anything other than primary sources. And, this lesson will have been learned within the first few weeks of the course.
Continuing with the Protestant Ladder
It is interesting to me that though there are 9,950 Google "results" when you type in "Catholic Ladder," there are only 155 for "Protestant Ladder," and most of them, when you look at them closely, bear no relationship to the competing Ladder used by Protestant missionary Henry Spalding (they refer to the general concept of the Protestant work ethic...climbing the Protestant ladder). Fortunately, the Oregon History Project page on the Protestant Ladder by Melinda Jette is done extremely well. Let's turn to it.
She skillfully and briefly explains the work of Presbyterian missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding in Lapwai on the Clearwater River (present-day Western Idaho, but part of the then-Oregon Territory). We learn that Spalding made a Protestant Ladder in 1845, probably in imitation of Blanchet, but Jette also mentions that Spalding's Ladder might have been related to a now lost earlier Protestant Ladder (1839) by Jason Lee. I suppose the Protestants imitated the Catholics in making ladders, but this kind of throws things up in the interpretive air for a minute. The OHP web page never answers the question of whose came first, since both Blanchet and Lee are credited with Ladders from 1839. Well, in any case, the Protestant Ladder, which is presented quite nicely in a photograph you can "blow up" on this page, differs in three ways from the Catholic Ladder.
First, it has lots of nice drawings on the sides, representing everything from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the building of the first city to the Tower of Babel. Humorous it is that so much space is devoted to depictions of the first chapters of Genesis. It is as if the maker of the Protestant Ladder realized after he had drawn about six scenes from Genesis that he was running out of space, and so he quickly leaped over lots of history to get to the crucifixion of Christ, the really big historical event. Around the time of Christ we have the interesting scene of John the Baptist's head being presented by Salome (never know if the Protestants were Caravaggio-lovers, you know..).
A second difference between the two Ladders is that the Protestant portrays two separate channels or tubes of history, the Catholic and the Protestant, rather than one. The Catholics had looked at the Protestants as a withered branch; the Protestants recognized the "parallel track" of the Roman Catholic Church with the Pope in charge.
Finally, however, the Protestant Ladder shows that the Catholic "track" of history will end in an unceremonious way when the road turns back on itself and the Pope is overturned. The last picture on the "Catholic side" shows an upside-down Pope being lowered into a fire--perhaps he will fall victim to the same fires with which he has burned the Protestant martyrs. What lies at the end of the Protestant road, in contrast? A straight road to heaven. The Protestant road is narrower than the Catholic one ("narrow is the way that leads to salvation") but it, after all, is the "true" one.
By looking at the competing Catholic and Protestant Ladders, then, the student can see how artistic representation can be used in the service of religious propaganda.
Spalding and Whitman and the Protestant Ladder
Jette further informs us, however, that Spalding seemed to make very little use of the Ladder in teaching. Why? Because Protestants, as "people of the Book" and "transformers of culture" (no, George Bush isn't the first "transformer"), were more interested in cultivating literacy and the land for the Indians. By 1839 Spalding had published the first printed book in the Nez Perce language (Jette doesn't tell us if this was a Bible, but the eager student would, no doubt, follow up this lead), and the Protestant Ladder just seemed to be a kind of afterthought so as not to let the Catholics have all the good ideas.
Let's pause here for a moment. If a student was going to look at early Oregon missions, s/he might proceed as I have in the last few pages, or s/he might want to wander further afield. Three projects that grow directly out of this would be to try to understand the mission that hasn't been named so far--that of Jason Lee in Salem. The Methodist archives on State Street in Salem hold a treasure that hasn't yet been really closely examined by scholars regarding the early days of the Willamette mission. Or, a student might want to study the Whitman's or Spalding's mission more closely, to learn about their work, the Indians, the language, the life. But the next really big topic is the Whitman massacre of November 1847. Here the OHP helps us get started nicely. Let's close this essay with what the OHP has.
The Whitman Massacre and its Historiography
By continuing to probe, or by selecting this as his/her topic, a student can learn not only about primary texts and an important shaping event in the history of the Oregon Territory, but also about competing versions or interpretations of the same event. And, s/he can learn about this all very naturally and easily through the exposure to primary texts. Here is what we have.
The OHP has the title page and a brief description of John Baptiste Brouillet's 1869 book Authentic Account of the Murder of Dr. Whitman and Other Missionaries by the Cayuse Indians, in 1847, and the Causes which Led to that Horrible Catastrophe. Here, however, is what the student would learn in the first instance. By looking at the title page to the 1869 edition, one notices the following Latin quotation on the cover: "Magna est veritas, et praevalebit." Of course, no student will know the Latin (what would spark High-school student interest in Latin? I have some ideas...), so it would have to be translated for him/her. But, you can teach the student some rudimentary Latin along the way, before telling them that it means "Great is truth, and it will prevail." Why, you might ask, would such a quotation be on the cover of this work? Well, perhaps there was a debate over what was "truth" in the Whitman massacre. Now you are ready for some real learning.
And, thankfully, the OHP page, thanks to Melinda Jette again, lays out the issue fairly nicely. The "Whitman Massacre" (what should we call it?) happened in November 1847, with several members of the Whitman party being killed and about 50 hostages being taken. Brouillet buried the bodies on the Mission several days later. At this time Brouillet warned Spalding that he was in danger, and Spalding fled. Later Spalding thanked the Catholics for their help in sparing his life. Later still, however, according to Jette, Spalding changed his tune, supporting retaliation against the Cayuse and implying Catholic complicity in the Whitman tragedy. This, then, became the occasion for the first edition of Brouillet's book, published in 1853, six years after the fateful events. Over the next 20 years charges flew back and forth between the two sides.
Thus, an eager student could do a study on the historiography of the Whitman Massacre. It would involve the reading of primary texts, the assessment of various facts, and the way that writers put facts together to make an argument.
A student could do all this, and we still haven't exhausted all the resources of the "Mission page" of the OHP. One final essay will discuss another text or two, which do not relate to the missions but do connect with other points made by Robbins in his "700 words."
But now I will stop, since is is 100 degrees in Oregon...
Copyright © 2004-2008 William R. Long