Whitman Mission National Historic Site

The Cayuse called the place Waiilatpu, the place of the rye grass. After the killings of November 1847 the dead were buried together near the mission, and for decades the grave was a dirt mound inside a picket fence. William Gray, once the mission's carpenter, spent the 1870s and 1880s raising money for a monument to Marcus Whitman as a martyr. His first design had the doctor standing with a book in one hand and a flag in the other, his wife beside him and thirteen slain figures at their feet. He scaled it down to a Celtic cross, learned in 1880 that the association had collected $417.30 and owned no land to put anything on, and died in 1889 with nothing built.

Portland's Presbyterian ministers took it up for the fiftieth anniversary. In August 1897 a Walla Walla marble works contracted for a twenty-seven-foot granite shaft on the hill and a marble slab over the grave carrying the names of the dead, to be paid for as donations came in. Some 3,000 people came on November 29, 1897, to hear Catherine Sager Pringle, who had survived the killings as a girl; the stone was still on its way from Vermont and was in place by January 1898, with more than half the bill unpaid ten years later. In 1914 Gray and his wife were reburied beside the grave he had fenced. Through the 1920s and 1930s the Kiwanis kept the grounds as Whitman Memorial Park, and visitors parked beside the grave and drove up the hill to the shaft.

The mission ground itself had gone back to farming. Walla Walla raised the money to buy it for the 1936 centennial and gave it to the nation, and the Park Service man who inspected it that year counted the controversy over the Whitman legend, the story that Whitman's 1842 ride east had saved Oregon for the United States, as a draw for visitors. The national monument came in 1940. Excavations from 1941 uncovered the foundations that the trails now pass, along with the restored millpond, ditch and orchard, and Congress gave the site its present name in 1962.