“Then why do the white people themselves have the disease?” asked a Cayuse.

None could answer.  The question had turned Joe Lewis’s word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing.  He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful.  The men waited seriously to hear what he would say.

It was the same Indian who had appeared at the mission after the joke of the plugged melons.

“Brothers, listen.  The missionaries are conjurers.  They conjured the melons at Wauelaptu.  They made the melons sick.  I went to missionary chief.  He say, ‘I make the melons well.’  I leave the braves sick, with their faces turned white, when I go to the chief.  I return, and they are well again.  The missionaries conjure the melons, to save their gardens.  They conjure you now, to get your furs.”

The evidence was conclusive to the Cayuse mind.  The missionaries were conjurers.  The council resolved that all the medicine-men in the country should be put to death, and among the first to perish should be Whitman, the conjurer.

Such in effect was the result of the secret council or councils held around Wauelaptu.

Whitman felt the change that had come over the disposition of the tribes, but he did not know what was hidden behind the dark curtain.  His great soul was full of patriotic fire, of love to all men, and zeal for the gospel.

He was nothing to himself—­the cause was everything.  He rode hither and thither on the autumn days and bright nights, engaged in his great work.

He went to Oregon City for supplies.

“Mr. McKinley,” he said to a friend, “a Cayuse chief has told me that the Indians are about to kill all the medicine-men, and myself among them.  I think he was jesting.”

“Dr. Whitman,” said McKinley, “a Cayuse chief never jests.”

He was right.  The fateful days wore on.  The splendid nights glimmered over Mount Hood, and glistened on the serrated mountain tents of eternal snow.  The Indians continued to sicken and die, and the universal suspicion of the tribes fell upon Whitman.

Suddenly there was a war-cry!  The mission ran with blood.  Whitman and his wife were the first to fall.  Then horror succeeded horror, and many of the heroic pioneers of the Columbia River perished.

“The Jesuits have been accused of causing the murder of Whitman,” said one historian of Washington to me.  “They indignantly deny it.  I have studied the whole subject for years with this opinion, that the Indian outbreak and its tragedies had its origin, and largely gathered its force, from the terrible joke of the conjured melons.

“That was the evidence that must have served greatly to turn the Indian mind against one of the bravest men that America has produced, and whose name will stand immortal among the heroes of Washington and Oregon.”

I give this account as a local story, and not as exact history; but this tradition was believed by the old people in Washington.