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Informationen zum Autor Blaine Harden is a contributor to The Economist , PBS Frontline , and Foreign Policy , and has formerly served as The Washington Post 's bureau chief in East Asia and Africa. He is the author of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot ; Escape from Camp 14 , an international bestseller published in 27 languages; A River Lost ; and Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent , which won a Pen American Center citation for a first book of non-fiction. Klappentext The New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14 returns with a riveting narrative that traces the truth behnd-and the impact of-a myth that tainted the history of the West In 1847, the missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were killed by members of the Cayuse tribe near present-day Walla Walla, Washington. A final response to years of Cayuse frustration with the Whitmans, the event recorded in Western history as the "Whitman Massacre" was a tipping point in American expansion, leading Congress to make the Oregon Country an official U.S. territory. It also became the kernel of a triumphal fiction of Western expansionism peddled by hucksters who would distort the actual history of how the U.S. became a continental nation. Their lie would torment the Cayuse tribe for more than 150 years. The fable's principal author was the Reverend Henry Spalding, a fellow missionary who, for his own personal gain, invented a story that portrayed his slain colleague as a heroic patriot and a Christian martyr. As Spalding told it, before Whitman was killed, he had ridden his horse across the country to Washington, D.C., where he persuaded the president to "save" Oregon from a British and Catholic plot to steal the Northwest away from the United States. Spalding persuaded Congress to endorse and print his myth. It was presented as fact in The New York Times and the Encyclopedia Britannica; and, by the end of the nineteenth century, Marcus Whitman was widely recognized as one of the most significant men in American history. Meanwhile, as the killers of a man now falsely hailed as a national hero, the Cayuses were demonized, hanged, dispossessed, and cheated. Along with two neighboring tribes, they were stripped of nearly all their land and consigned to the Umatilla Reservation in northeast Oregon. In this fascinating, impeccably researched narrative, New York Times bestselling author Blaine Harden traces the origins and effects of a foundational American myth across more than a century. Exposing the self-serving nature of American myth-making, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the dark realities of American expansion and of the lies that can persist when history is told only by victors. Story Locale: The Oregon Territory/present-day Washington Zusammenfassung Finalist for the 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award “Terrific.” –Timothy Egan, The New York Times “ A riveting investigation of both American myth-making and the real history that lies beneath. ” – Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, a “terrifically readable” ( Los Angeles Times ) account of one of the most persistent “a lternative facts ” in American history: the story of a missionary, a tribe, a massacre, and a myth that shaped the American West In 1836, two missionaries and their wives were among the first Americans to cross the Rockies by covered wagon on what would become the Oregon Trail. Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries. But Spalding would succeed as a propagandist, inventing a s...
