Cayuse

01Summary

Horse breeders of the Columbia Plateau whose country lay across the trail between the Blue Mountains and the Walla Walla valley. In 1847 a measles epidemic killed as many as half the Cayuse, many of them children, and the killings at the Whitman Mission and the Cayuse War that followed changed the Pacific Northwest.

02History

In their own language, now no longer spoken, the Cayuse may have called themselves Liksiyu. They also call themselves Weyíiletpuu, 'people of the ryegrass,' a name from the Nez Perce language that many Cayuse came to speak. Their villages lay along the Walla Walla, Umatilla and Grande Ronde rivers, and their wealth was in horses: by the early 1800s a Cayuse family with only 15 or 20 horses was thought poor. The hardy ponies they bred gave English the word 'cayuse.'

In 1836 Cayuse leaders, Umtippe among them, allowed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman to build a mission at Waiilatpu. Relations soured over land, religion and the growing stream of wagons. The Cayuse had been promised payment for the use of their land, and it never came, while emigrants used up their firewood and grass and took game without asking.

Trade went on all the same. In 1843 emigrants bought camas root from Native families in the Grande Ronde valley, and corn, peas and potatoes at a village below the Blue Mountains, and Peter Burnett wrote that he had 'never tasted a greater luxury than the potatoes.'

In 1847 measles swept through Cayuse country and killed as many as half the Cayuse, many of them children, while most white patients at the mission recovered. Beginning on November 29 a small group of Cayuse men killed the Whitmans and eleven others. Oregon volunteers rode against the Cayuse, at times attacking bands that had no part in the killings, and the Cayuse War went on for years.

In 1850 five Cayuse men, Tiloukaikt and Tomahas among them, were handed over for trial and hanged at Oregon City. Asked on the way why he gave himself up, Tiloukaikt is reported to have said: 'Did not your missionaries teach us that Christ died to save his people? So die we to save our people.'

At the Walla Walla Council of 1855 the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla signed a treaty giving up about 6.4 million acres and keeping a shared reservation near present-day Pendleton, Oregon.

03Notable leaders

• Tiloukaikt
  Cayuse headman at Waiilatpu from 1840 and one of the Whitmans' sharpest critics. He was one of five Cayuse men hanged at Oregon City on June 3, 1850.
• Tomahas
  Cayuse man accused of striking the first blow against Marcus Whitman, hanged with Tiloukaikt in 1850.

04Today