W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2000 Religious change and Plateau Indians: 1500 -1850 Larry Cebula College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the History of Religion Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Cebula, Larry, "Religious change and Plateau Indians: 1500 -1850" (2000). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623971. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-tjsq-7h32 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Religious Change and Plateau Indians: 1500-1850 A dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department o f History The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Larry Cebula 1999 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number 9982013 UMI* UMI Microform9982013 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Beil & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Religious Change and Plateau Indians: 1500-1850 by Larry Cebula A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy College o f William and Mary 1999 Approved by .-4 * uCC James L. Axtell, Chairman of the Supervisory Committee Carol Sheriff, Primary Reader James P. Whittenburg Scott Nelson James P. Ronda *4LLL r t Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT v Introduction 2 Chapter One: A World o f Spirits 10 Chapter Two: The Knowledge Revolution 43 Chapter Three: The Columbian Religion 81 Chapter Four: Plateau Indians and the Rejection of Christianity 144 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 217 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements None of us work alone. This study could not have come into being without the work, advice, friendship, love, and support o f dozens o f people. I am most grateful to my wife, Renee. Her love, and her occasional gentle admonishments have been indispensable. Renee kept me from joining the ranks of the terminal ABDs, and probably becoming a hermit. I also want to thank my children, Mac and Rachael, often brought me out o f the office and reminded me what is really important in life. And our new baby, Samuel Epenow, gave me one more reason to get this done. My advisor, James Axtell, has been wonderful to work for. His comments on each draft have been encouraging, incisive, and exhaustive. His own scholarship has served as a model o f deep research, careful thought, and graceful writing. Somewhere on this long road, he and went from being advisor and advisee to sharing a friendship, and for that especially I am grateful. The members o f my dissertation committee were uniformly terrific. James Ronda had wonderful comments and corrections for many of the chapters. Carroll Sheriff and James Whittenberg, insisted that I explain my methods to those who do not practice ethnohistory. And Scott Nelson tried to offer catchy alternatives to my leaden chapter titles. Their comments improved the quality o f this work. My colleagues at Missouri Southern State College have been more than supportive. Tom Simpson, Virginia Laas, James Geier, Paul Teverow, Bill Tannenbaum, Cindi Spencer and Robert Markman in particular offered friendship, advice, and sometimes cold beer. I also want to thank my department chair, Richard Miller, and the administration for helpfully pointing out that they would in fact fire me if I did not finish this dissertation. This proved motivating. Many o f my friends and colleagues at Eastern Washington University deserve special thanks. J. William T. Youngs has been a friend and mentor for so long that I can hardly recall life without him. Claude Nichols helped spark my interest in western history in the first place. Archivist Charlie Mutschler retrieved many hundreds of books and manuscripts for me over the years, and offered much encouragement. John Alan Ross brought his terrific knowledge o f traditional Plateau life to a close reading of the first chapter. Bruce Hallmark served as a patient and critical sounding board for many of my ideas, and shared his research on disease epidemics with me. Virginia Adsit offered all sorts o f administrative support. I especially want to thank Mike Green and Dick Donley, who taught me the fine points o f historical analysis and the rudiments o f elk hunting. I hope that in these pages I have proven better at the former than I did at the latter. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT This study is an ethnohistorical examination o f Indian religious responses to contact with Euroamericans on the Columbia Plateau, from 1600 to 1850. Plateau natives understood their encounter with European civilization primarily as a momentous spiritual event, and sought new sources o f spiritual power to cope with their rapidly changing world. White people seemed to the Indians to have an abundance of spirit power, and many native religious efforts were aimed at capturing some of this power for themselves. These efforts included the protohistoric Prophet Dance, the syncretic "Columbian Religion" o f the fiir trade era, and the initial enthusiastic response to the first Christian missionaries on the Plateau. Each o f these attempts was marked by great enthusiasm at first, and each was abandoned with bitter disappointment as the material condition of the natives worsened. By 1850, most Indians had abandoned the idea that the spirit power of the white people could ever be accessed by themselves, and new religious impulses took the form o f nativist movements which sought to purge the natives o f white influences. Because both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries were active on the Plateau, I also compare the conversion efforts of the two faiths. To native eyes, the cultural flexibility, language skills, impressive ceremonies, and superior organizational structure o f the Catholics compared favorably to the stem and incomprehensible doctrines o f the Protestants. But in both cases most Indians accepted Christian doctrines only as a supplement, and not as a replacement of native beliefs. True converts proved rare before the reservation period. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Religious Change and Plateau Indians: 1500-1850 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction Joe Meek knew how to hang an Indian. The recently appointed Marshall of Oregon knew as much about the natives as any man in the territory. As a mountain man he had lived among Indians for most of his adult life. Meek traded with Indians, he played their games, shared their prayers, wintered in their lodges, and had taken not one but two native wives. He had killed Indians as well—sometimes as a member of a native war party, sometimes in self-defense, and sometimes for the fun and frivolity of killing. But as the fur trade faded in the 1840s, Meek abandoned the free life of the mountains and moved to the Willamette Valley to try his hand at farming. When the burgeoning American settlement there needed a law officer, Meek was only too glad to exchange his plow for a badge. As he climbed the gallows that day in 1850, Meek was turning his back on his old way of life and returning to the fold of American civilization.1 The Indians knew they would hang.