Frenchtown Historic Site

Frenchtown was never a town, only cabins strung along the Walla Walla River where French-Canadian fur-company men had settled with their Native wives and children, among them Joseph Larocque and his wife, Lizette Walla Walla. In late 1855, months after the treaty council in this valley, Oregon's territorial governor sent the Oregon Mounted Volunteers east against the Walla Walla, Umatilla and Palouse; Walla Walla men had raided the Hudson's Bay post at Wallula. On December 5 Peopeomoxmox, Yellow Bird, head chief of the Walla Walla, came to the volunteers under a white flag, offered to repay what had been taken, and was held with four other men as a hostage against an attack on his village.

On December 7, as the volunteers moved up the valley toward the old Whitman mission, the fighting began, and that first day Peopeomoxmox and the four others were killed in the volunteers' custody at the Larocque cabin, which the volunteers held as their headquarters and hospital. His body was scalped and mutilated; one volunteer later admitted taking the scalp. For four days Walla Walla, Cayuse, Umatilla, Palouse and other warriors fought them along the river, in what the site's foundation calls the longest Indian battle in the territory's history, until a relief column reached the volunteers, short of food and ammunition, on the last day. Some Frenchtown men had ridden with the volunteers.

The St. Rose of Lima mission church and the Frenchtown cemetery were established on this ground in 1876. The Frenchtown Historical Foundation keeps the upper ground around the cemetery, with a trail and signs on the battle, the settlement and the valley. In 2009 it agreed to transfer the lower ground along the river to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, whose people include the Walla Walla, and both halves have been planted back to native grass.