Revisiting Frenchtown

LOWDEN - The descendants of the Frenchtown settlers listened to their ancestors with bated breath.

LThe voices they heard from the 19th century - echoed by historical interpreters from the Fort Walla Walla Museum - belonged to William McBean, chief fur trader for the Hudson Bay Co., and Suzanne Dauphin Cayouse, who married a settler in the Whitman party. They belonged to Father J.B.A. Brouillet and to Father Eugene Chirouse, Catholic priests who lived among the Metis, the mixed-race French-Indian settlers formerly employed by the trading companies.

One by one, the historic figures described life during the tumultuous confluence of cultures and colonizers between mighty rivers and the traders' trails running like veins of commerce through the inland Northwest. It's a history some say is badly in need of a more balanced interpretation.

This weekend's Frenchtown "Rendezvous," which was also attended by descendants from the Indian tribes that populated the region, presented an opportunity for everyone to hear more than the typical "white man's" perspective on the lost history of the first European foothold in the area well before the arrival of the Whitman party and the conflicts that followed.

More than 300 Frenchtown descendants from the Northwest, Canada, Alaska and California came to Saturday's Rendezvous historic celebration, including a large contingent of Touchet Valley Gagnons who descend directly from Suzanne Dauphin Cayouse.

The gathering was as much intended to raise money for the new Frenchtown historical site here as it was a revival of the Rendezvous celebrations that launched the Frenchtown Historical Foundation in the 1990s.

And it was a chance to revisit moments and actions in time that had far-reaching consequences for those who were here and those who came after the Battle of French- town in 1855 representing the last clash between Native and new Americans.

"It's unreal how the Indians were treated," said Kitty (Gagnon) Greenwell, who grew up in the Gagnon home on the McKay Alto Road north of Waitsburg.

Greenwell came to the Rendezvous with 16 other Gagnons. Cayouse was Greenwell's great- great- great- great-grandmother. She married Matthieu Dauphin and gave birth to, among other siblings, Rosalie Dauphin, who married Marcel Gagnon, a retired Metis fur trader who later donated the land for the St. Rose of Lima Mission at Frenchtown.

Marge Benson, Greenwell's sister from Waitsburg, said the gathering was a chance for her to get together with family and be reminded of their rich history.

"We forget so much of what we were told (as children)," she said. "I think it's wonderful to keep history alive."

She and many others said they were particularly moved by the invocation from Cayuse religious leader Armand Minthorn, who urged the crowd to take in all perspectives of the area's history, including the dispossession and marginalization of the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla tribes.

He invited everyone to stand as he sang a mournful, seven-drums prayer pre-dating the arrival of the Europeans, accompanied by a bell the Indians adopted from the new culture. Many who left the event after the salmon dinner came up and thanked Minthorn for his words and prayer.

"It was tragic, but we survived," Minthorn said afterward about the ruin brought on his people by disease, war and displacement.

Himself a descendant of one of the five Cayuse hanged in Oregon City for the murder of Marcus Whitman, Minthorn said the protestant missionary was neither the "medicine man" nor the "spiritual father" he purported to be and accused him of spreading the measles through blankets he gifted the Indians.

When so many Cayuse began to die at Whitman's hands, the Indians could only follow a long-held tradition and take the life of a counterproductive medicine man, Minthorn said.

Other historical observers at the gathering agreed Whitman was less than successful as a missionary and much more adept at facilitating commerce through the mission.

Much more rigid in his conditions for baptism than his Catholic counterparts who converted more than 6,000 Indians to their faith, Whitman didn't baptize a single tribesman, said Dan Clark, president and director of the Frenchtown Historical Foundation.

Even after he was warned for weeks to leave the area because of an imminent Indian attack on his entire party, Whitman stayed to oversee the reception of trading parties at his mission.

After Whitman's death in 1847, the local tribes were forced into a treaty that paved the way for the white settlers' land rush and spelled the end of Frenchtown. Clashes followed the Walla Walla Treaty Council of 1855.

In June that year, Oregon Mounted Volunteers marched up from the Willamette Valley and found the Hudson Bay Co. post at Fort Walla Walla destroyed. About 15 miles up the Touchet River, Walla Walla Chief Peopeomoxmox (Yellow Bird) and four warriors met the volunteers under a white flag of truce to avoid an attack on their village.

They were taken hostage, and a running battle with a larger body of Indian tribes - Walla Walla, Umatilla, Cayuse and Palouse - broke out following the Walla Walla River. The Indians retreated to the LaRocque cabin in Frenchtown. The Volunteers captured the cabin and used it as their headquarters and hospital only to find themselves under siege from the tribal warriors.

As the Volunteer casualties grew, they turned to their hostages who were killed, scalped and, in the case of the chief, dismembered with parts of his body divided among the troops as souvenirs.

Today's Walla Walla Chief Carl Sampson, who attended the Rendezvous, told the gathering that he has been in search of chief Peopeopmoxmox's parts for much of his life because the late chief's spirit will not rest until they are brought back to the reservation.

"It's hard for me to talk about these things, but I want the truth to come out because I have a deep pain in my heart from this injustice," he said.

After the battle, the Walla Walla area was put under martial law and the Frenchtown Metis scattered throughout the area with some joining their Indian families on the reservation.

The settlement's history will be recounted through interpretive signs on the Frenchtown Historic Site located on Highway 12 at milepost 328 about eight miles west of Walla Walla.