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The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West
by Cassandra Tate
A highly-readable, myth-busting history of the Whitman Massacre—a pivotal event in the history of the American West—that includes the often-missing Native American point of view.
In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, devout missionaries from upstate New York, established a Presbyterian mission on Cayuse Indian land near what is now the fashionable wine capital of Walla Walla, Washington. Eleven years later, a group of Cayuses killed the Whitmans and eleven others in what became known as the Whitman Massacre. The attack led to a war of retaliation against the Cayuse; the extension of federal control over the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming; and martyrdom for the Whitmans. Today, however, the Whitmans are more likely to be demonized as colonizers than revered as heroes.
In Unsettled Ground, historian and journalist Cassandra Tate takes a fresh look at the personalities, dynamics, disputes, social pressures, and shifting legacy of a pivotal event in the history of the American West.
"[Tate] tells the Cayuse's side of the story with empathy and clarity ... a meticulously researched book." —The Seattle Times
"Unsettled Ground is both the gripping adventure story of a cross-continental journey and a cultural exploration of the collision of two very different ways of life... . Told with depth and insight, Tate's account is a prism that allows us to see the multiple dimensions of a classic frontier conflict." —Peter Stark, author of Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire
"In this overdue era of righting unbalanced histories, Cassandra Tate reexamines a deadly tragedy from the nineteenth-century American West. Unsettled Ground is a riveting blend of intricate research, fresh cultural perspective, and first-rate storytelling." —Dave Boling, author of Guernica and The Lost History of Stars
This information about Unsettled Ground was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Cassandra Tate is a Seattle-based writer and editor. A former journalist, she earned a Ph.D in American history at the University of Washington in 1995. She is the author of Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of "The Little White Slaver." Her work has been published in Smithsonian, Columbia Journalism Review, and other national magazines, and she has contributed more than 200 articles to HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history. She is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
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