A new pioneer history for ‘anyone interested in the truth’
Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 16, 2026
DEAR READER: In 1974, after he handed down his historic decision upholding the fishing rights of Northwest treaty tribes, Federal Judge George H. Boldt was appalled by the violence that erupted as state officials clumsily enforced his orders.
“It came as a shock that the vast majority of Washington residents — at least those that fish — don’t give a damn about Indian rights,” Boldt said, adding that “anyone interested in the truth” should learn the facts about what happened in the 1850s when the federal government set out to “extinguish” Indian land claims by making hollow promises.
“Anyone interested in the truth” has new urgency. Millions of Americans remain willfully ignorant of verifiable facts out of intellectual laziness or because they can’t handle the truth; often both.
Granted, it takes diligence to uncover the truth today, with social media spreading rumors, distortions and outright lies at the speed of light. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, has the scary ability to blend verifiable facts, half-truths and gibberish into palatable smoothies. America’s surviving newspapers —newsrooms depleted — struggle for traction in a world where people expect quality information for free. And cynical, enterprising politicians fan the “culture war” bonfires, shading history right and left.
These are hard times for truth.
IN 2008, when I became a full-time historian, after 42 years as a journalist, I had the mandate and the time to dig deeper and wider than ever before. I loved the rigor. On any given project, I spent months conducting interviews, plowing through books, documents, photos and ephemera at the State Library, State Archives and State Historical Society. I traveled the Northwest, visiting museums and universities. A week in Missoula and Stevensville, Montana, tracing Judge Boldt’s formative years yielded important new material about his knowledge of settler colonialism. In particular, Boldt knew the story of the Bitterroot Inland Salish, cruelly displaced from their ancient homeland in 1891 and herded 60 miles north to the Flathead Reservation.
As I sat in the archives of the University of Montana, reading speech transcripts and Boldt family letters, I flashed back to my Washington State History Class at Aberdeen’s Miller Junior High School in 1957. The major reading assignment was Companion of Adventure, a whitewashed biography of Isaac I. Stevens, our first territorial governor, who broke many of his promises to the Indians practically before the ink was dry on their chiefs’ Xs. The book also extolled the exploits of the “heroic and noble” pioneers who “achieved the conquest and settlement of this vast region” by “civilizing” the Indians. The contentious Medicine Creek Treaty Council of 1854 is described like this: “Everyone from blanket braves, to booted settlers, to dapper officers of the U.S. Army … was smiling and contented.”
That was just one of the more outrageous lies my history teacher taught us. Another was that Robert Gray, who “discovered” our harbor on May 7, 1792, was nice to the Indians. Unquestionably a brave and resourceful sailor, Gray also had a hair-trigger temper. At anchor here on the night of his arrival, he ordered the crew of the Columbia to open fire on a group of Indians approaching the ship, killing 20. They were “possibly only curious to see the strange ‘canoe’ first hand,” historian J. Richard Nokes wrote in an objective account of Gray’s life.
I can tell that some of you are puckering your lips, certain I’m about to advance the “woke” notion that the Indians got a raw deal. After all, don’t they have “all the fish,” as one angry steelheader assured me, plus casinos and cut-rate service stations?
ANYONE INTERESTED in the truth about settler-Indian relations will find sobering revelations in a new book called The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-ups in the Pioneer Northwest. “Illahee” is a Chinook Jargon term for the Natives’ “homeland.”
Marc James Carpenter, a North Dakota history professor who grew up in Oregon, has given us a painstakingly researched account of pioneer crimes against the Indians — wanton acts of violence, including murder, mutilations, torture and rape, that were covered up and sanitized from influential histories in allegiance to a “pioneer code” that maintained all settler stories “must be heroic, no matter the evidence” to the contrary.
Dr. Marcus Whitman, the settlers’ missionary martyr, was executed for malpractice by the Cayuse near present-day Walla Walla in 1847 after measles ravaged the tribe. Indians died, whites survived. Whitman, his wife Narcissa, and 11 other whites were killed in retaliation, setting off what came to be called the Cayuse War: Open season on Indians. The settlers raised a volunteer army and — claiming they were under massive attack — beseeched Congress to bolster their ranks with federal troops “to repel the attacks of [a] formidable a foe” that had “crimsoned their tomahawks in the blood of our citizens.”
Welcoming ever-increasing numbers of Oregon Trail pioneers, Dr. Whitman, tellingly, had written: “It does not concern me so much what is to become of any particular set of Indians. … I have no doubt our greatest work is to be to aid the white settlement of this country and help to found its religious institutions. … Indeed, I am fully convinced that when a people refuse or neglect to fill the designs of Providence, they ought not to complain at the results, and so it is equally useless for Christians to be anxious on their account.”
Onward Christian soldiers.
IN THE “Maxon Massacre” of 1856, a bloodthirsty volunteer militia “marauded through the lower Nisqually River region, capturing or killing any Native person they found,” Carpenter writes. Seventeen to 30 or more Indians fleeing across the river, “mostly women, children, and unarmed men,” were killed. “There were disputes over whether the Americans had waded in to murder the babies by hand, or whether they had simply watched them die in the current. But there was no question that the Americans had killed children.”
The Quinaults were luckier than most tribes in avoiding wholesale violent confrontation. For one thing, they drove a hard bargain with Governor Stevens and kept most of their land, for the time being at least. For another, most of the white pioneers were aspiring farmers. The Quinault Nation’s evergreen wilderness was less promising for cultivation. In any case, the government’s treaty promises were soon forgotten. Medical care was atrocious; schools never built; tribal lands expropriated by whites. The “blanket braves” were no longer contented, just collateral damage to Manifest Destiny.
“The Indian, like the negro, is a product of a long succession of ages, with an environment favorable to barbarism,” a newly-appointed Indian agent was advised in 1862 by a leading Oregon politician. “… On the outside the appearance is, that the Government is trying to civilize the Indians, when in fact there is no such intention. They are put upon reservations, where goods and rations are occasionally doled out to them, for the reason that it is cheaper to do that than to fight them.”
Envisioning Indians as bloodthirsty savages — “less than people” — gave white Northwest pioneers license to be complicit in theft and murder, Carpenter writes. And it wasn’t rare.
At a forum in 2021, the professor heard a scholar he respects declare, “The pioneers weren’t evil, they were human.” Unquestionably, not every pioneer was a killer, Carpenter writes, but the myth of collective pioneer virtue clouds our reckoning with the persistent reality of racism. Consider this evil: “A third or more of Indigenous women experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, and few perpetrators face justice.”
John C. Hughes was chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State for 17 years after retiring as editor and publisher of The Daily World in 2008.
