Sort of sticking close to home lately, because it’s a chore to deal with the ignorance around me regarding face masks and far to many other hot button issues. This area is a hot bed of aggressive conservatism: racism in its many forms, anti-vac’ers, flat earther’s, evangelical style religion, everything bad you can think of, the majority in this area embrace. So it wears on me after a while and I tend to stay home. Occasionally, I’ll just get a need to bug out and will jump in the car and drive up to Walla Walla (8 miles away and we locals call it Walla2 or just W2), or I’ll drive around the M-F area. So that’s what happened a while ago when I ventured out and headed north to Walla2.
I drove up to the Fort Walla2 museum and sure enough, it was open. I’ve passed it plenty of times when heading to downtown Walla2 but I was always on my way somewhere so didn’t stop. This time, I made it a point to make it a destination. Arrived around 11 AM on a day after a nice rain shower that cleared the air and had brought out the fresh late spring smell of the nearby farm country.
This area has a rich history as the Indians of the area have lived here for at least 5,000 years, moving up from the south as the Ice Age waned and the periodic massive floods from broken ice dams abated. There were very likely settlers here long before 5,000 years ago but the massive floods this valley experienced would have scoured the landscape clean of much of the evidence.
When the Whitman mission was established…with permission of the local Indians, it preceded the Oregon Trail…which eventually moved north and meandered right next to the mission. Indians massacred the missionaries because the Whitman’s didn’t hold up their part of the agreement and provide gifts every year to the tribe, AND because they were suspected of bringing diseases to the area. The settlement was abandoned after the massacre and stayed empty for many years. It’s a rich and complex history but suffice to say, Fort Walla Walla was installed because of the outrage of the eastern US population of the massacre. Remember that this area was basically a foreign country to much of the US back then. The massacre sort of galvanized the movement to annex the western portion of the continent and subdue the savages. Whipped into a frenzy by religious fanatics because it was ‘missionaries’ that were massacred, never mind that the local Native Americans (NAs) were living by their own codes, sort of sealed the fate of all Native Americans in the following years. This fort wasn’t established until 11 years AFTER the massacre and was a show of force in the region right along the Oregon trail and became both a way point and protection for settlers heading for the Willamette valley in Oregon, which was a much more popular destination at the time due to it’s access to two large rivers, deep water and potential ports, the ocean, and relatively peaceful NAs who had been dealing with Europeans since Lewis & Clark, followed by trappers and the fur trade. It was in 1824 that Fort Vancouver at the junction of the Willamette and Columbia rivers had been established so settlers wanted to go there rather then rough it in the Walla Walla Valley area.
The military presence here took advantage of their strength, supply lines, and modern weaponry to brutalize the locals into submission, and of course the earlier outbreaks of smallpox helped reduce the tribes strength. Not to excuse the Indians of the massacre but there were some substantial reasons for it, some based on misunderstandings that Whitman could have cleared up long before. And the smallpox outbreaks. He’s not in the least responsible for his own murder of course, but he could have handled things much better prior to the massacre.
So the Fort (est. 1858) was after the mission (massacre – 1847, est. 1836), and I’ll post something about the mission later but right now, it’s a visit to Fort Walla Walla. Masks are required in the buildings, and tourists start out in the main lobby, then visit 4 other large venues with antiques and stuff. This first part is of the main section of the museum. Usually I get a picture of the front doorway but not this time. Just inside the doors and down a short hallway is a store where I bought my ticket, presented the ticket to the gal at the entrance booth and then entered the museum proper.
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Off in the distance on the hill is the mass grave. Only 13 died and 48 were captured and used for ransom.
I didn’t see any explanation of why it’s called the ‘Late Night Trailhead’ so I’ll just assume it’s a trail that gives hikers a nice view of the Las Vegas lights late at night?
