The Liksiyu people watched as the wagons trampled into their lands. They were in awe of the amount of people - easily over one thousand - that laid claim to their forest at Waiilatpu. They quickly became busy building new huts, new domiciles of worship, clearing the trees from the ground. Strange men in round hats started to proselytize about the promises of heaven and God, and the fury the Liksiyu had caused to Him from their millennia-old traditions. 

The strange men brought many hungry people on their way into the forest. While not busy preaching, the interlopers hunted for game, leaving little behind for the Liksiyu to eat. Some of the adults would go hungry, so that the elders and the children could sustain themselves on what small scraps were left for them to collect. Good thing they were migrating for the upcoming winter.

After the game had run sparse from a thousand people endlessly gorging themselves, the strange men started to plough the fields to plant and grow their food. The Liksiyu had never done this; they would never dare to offend the divine wisdom of nature by sowing the land. This was an affront to their god, as the intruders struck hoe and scythe to the powerful creator. 

The Liksiyu elders chose a delegation to confront the strangers to collect tribute and payment, their rightful land pillaged without hesitation. Payment was the very least that the Liksiyu deserved. “Send these beggars away!” The strange men bellowed, and turned their backs on the Liksiyu ambassadors. The party returned to their people with nothing but disrespect.

The Liksiyu saw many plants grow from the land that had been sown by the strangers. The corn and gourds were ripe for the Liksiyu’s picking; after all, it was their land that was producing this bounty. The strangers would wake up to find their fruits missing, scraps left along the trail back to the Liksiyu tribe. The strangers started to get wise after a few raids on the growing fields. This last repossession came back up just as quickly as it had gone down. Poison. The contamination of this food further poisoned the hearts and minds of the Liksiyu against the intentions of the strangers.

The wagons kept coming onto their land, loaded with people and meat and grain, disembarking to join the strange men at their encampment, and restocked with the fruits of these men’s labors. Every day it seemed like something and someone new was arriving at the uninvited settlement. 

It was at that time that a new man had been brought to the strangers’ settlement, vaguely recognizable to the Liksiyu but also distinctly different. His name was Joe Lewis, born from a woman of the Iroquois tribe in the East and a white settler. Lewis was keenly aware of the relationship between the native tribes and the white settlers. He had watched it firsthand in the East, and he had the opportunity to turn the tide against the invaders in the West.

As more and more invaders arrived at the encampment, the Liksiyu started to get sick. The shaman Marcus Whitman brought death to the Liksiyu tribe. It was clear to the elders, those who were able to survive the invisible threat, that Whitman’s sermons were an attempt to summon illness from on high, clearing the Liksiyu from the land the strangers so desperately wanted. The Liksiyu had to protect their people.

It was not soon after the strange men arrived that the wife of Chief Umtippe had fallen ill. Many sick tribesmen and women and children had gone to see Whitman, but many did not return, and if they did, succumbed to the spirit realm shortly thereafter. The thought of losing his wife gravely frightened the Chief, and he marched to the encampment to confront Whitman directly.

“Doctor,” Umptippe commanded, “you have come here to give us bad medicines; you come to kill us, and you steal our lands. You had promised to pay me every year, and you have given me nothing. You had better go away; if my wife dies, you shall die also.” 

“I will never give you anything,” the shaman retorted. Umtippe turned away, the fire for his wife and his people still burning in his soul.

Upon returning to his camp, Umtippe was greeted by the chief of the neighboring Cayuse tribe, Tiloukaikt, who introduced him to Joe Lewis. Of all the patients that Dr. Whitman had treated, Lewis advised, none had been given medicine: instead, as Lewis shook with steaming anger, all of Umtippe’s people had been given strychnine. Poison and illness were the invaders’ weapons of choice to rid their coveted land of its unwanted inhabitants.

Enraged by this news, Umtippe and Tiloukaikt knew they had to act to dispel their forests of these evil men. For too long the tribe had appeased the strangers by allowing them to claim their land, to farm their food, and to hunt their game. To put their people in invisible danger, to cast Umtippe’s wife into the jaws of death, confirmed the shaman’s fate. 

That very day, the strangers would regret their ill will towards the Liksiyu and the Cayuse, Umptippe, Tiloukaikt, and Lewis decided. When they got to Whitman’s door, the men demanded from the shaman sufficient medicine to treat their sick. Whitman hurried to bring them the treatment, but this was not the reparation that the men had sought. While distracted by Tiloukaikt, another tribesman, Tomohas, lurched at Whitman’s head and struck the shaman down with a heavy blow of his hatchet. Blood splattered across the room as the summoner slumped to the floor, unable to further bring death to the Liksiyu with his mystical sermons. His face could not have been recognized when his wife, Narcissa, found him dying.

The men howled at their accomplishment, but the mission was far from over. Led by Tiloukaikt, the men departed Whitman’s home and quickly came upon a couple interlopers working outside, oblivious to the approaching threat. They fell slain as quickly as they could comprehend they were being attacked. 

Narcissa ran to the door leaving her husband’s body on the floor to look out at the growing commotion. As she surveyed the camp, she couldn’t have seen the flash of a rifle whose bullet struck her like lightning, throwing her back to lay lifeless among her husband in the open doorway. 

As the sun began to set, the battalion had a large lot of prisoners to bring back to their tribe. Upwards of fifty invaders had surrendered to the insurgents, choosing to hedge their bets that some deal might be struck for their lives. With the doctor no longer available, many succumbed to illness, just as the tribe had. The men needn’t lay a finger on their prisoners, the shaman’s death had clearly let loose a shockwave of ailment among the survivors. 

The Liksiyu and Cayuse men had started a war that they would not be able to finish. The strength of the growing United States government was like nothing they had ever faced before. Even after the tribe’s near-complete decimation, the survivors of the attack demanded that the Liksiyu and Cayuse face justice. Justice. As if the tribesmen were not doling out their own justice in their retribution. 

The trial for what the invaders were calling a massacre had begun. Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, and the other men had turned themselves in and tried to plead their case. To them, justice had been served already. The strangers had not only killed them with their invisible disease, but had given them false medicine and even poison in its place. But the white judge would not hear it, and all four were hanged by their necks until they died. The men had killed a hero who had saved Oregon.

“We have read of heroes of all times, never did we read of, or believe, that such heroism as these Indians exhibited could exist. They knew that to be accused was to be condemned, and that they would be executed in the civilized town of Oregon city…” - The United States Army and Navy Journal, and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, 1880