The rolling hills of the Palouse fading into a hazy golden sunset, seen west from Steptoe Butte
Caleb Riston / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
Washington · Region

Walla Walla & the Palouse

Cayuse, Walla Walla, Palus and Nez Perce country — the epidemic at Waiilatpu, the 1855 treaty council, the wheat hills of the Palouse, Palouse Falls, and the lower end of Hells Canyon.

5 places to explore

The Walla Walla Valley was Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla country, and in 1836 the missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman built a mission at Waiilatpu, west of the present city, that became a stopping place on the Oregon Trail. In the fall of 1847 measles came in with the emigrants and within two months killed about half the Cayuse, most of their children among them. Whitman, a doctor, could not check it, and some Cayuse came to believe he was poisoning them. On November 29 a party of Cayuse killed the Whitmans and eleven others at the mission. The war that followed opened a decade of fighting on the Plateau, and the mission ground is now Whitman Mission National Historic Site.

In late May 1855 Governor Isaac Stevens called the Nez Perce, the Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla, and the Yakama to a council in the valley, and thousands came. In two weeks three treaties were signed there, the ones that made the Yakama, Umatilla and Nez Perce reservations.

North of the Snake the land rolls into the Palouse, hills of wind-blown silt piled over the basalt and plowed into wheat to the horizon. Steptoe Butte, a summit of older rock the lava flows never buried, stands above them, and geologists named every such island of old rock a steptoe after it. The Palus people, many of whom refused to move onto any reservation, gave the country its name. On its western edge the Palouse River drops nearly two hundred feet at Palouse Falls into a canyon the Ice Age floods cut, and in the far southeast corner Asotin sits at the lower end of Hells Canyon.

What to See in Walla Walla & the Palouse

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Palouse Falls dropping into its round plunge pool in a basalt canyon, a faint rainbow in the spray

Palouse Falls

Washtucna

The falls a Palouse storyteller said a giant beaver's tail made, and that a school of Washtucna children wrote into state law in 2014.

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Historic Sites

Frenchtown Historic Site

Walla Walla

Where the Walla Walla leader Peopeomoxmox, who had come to the Oregon volunteers under a white flag, was killed as their hostage on December 7, 1855.

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Looking east from the summit of Steptoe Butte over the rolling wheat and fallow fields of the Palouse, the butte's own shadow and timbered slope below

Steptoe Butte

Colfax

James 'Cashup' Davis opened a hotel on the summit on July 4, 1888, at seventy-two; he died alone in it eight years later, and it burned in 1911.

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The grounds of Whitman Mission National Historic Site seen from the hill above, cottonwoods along a water channel and green farm fields beyond

Whitman Mission National Historic Site

Walla Walla

For forty years the only marks at Waiilatpu were a granite shaft on the hill and a marble slab over a common grave, and the stone arrived from Vermont too late for the anniversary it was made for.

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Towns & Gateways

The Snake River at Buffalo Eddy, dark basalt outcrops along the far bank below grassy, rim-rocked canyon walls

Buffalo Eddy

Asotin

Rock art on both banks of the Snake, made by the ancestors of the Nimiipuu over perhaps 4,500 years, and dated in part by what it shows.

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Stories from Walla Walla & the Palouse

History

The Levee on Gravel

In 1968 a rockshelter above the Palouse River gave up the oldest human remains then known in the Americas, weeks before a reservoir was due to cover it. A president ordered a levee to save it. The levee stood on gravel.

5 min read

Walla Walla & the Palouse rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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