Life
Spalding was born in Bath, New York, in either 1803 or 1804. He graduated from Western Reserve College in 1833, and entered Lane Theological Seminary in the class of 1837. He left, without graduation, upon his appointment in 1836 by the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) as a missionary to the Nez Perce Indians of Idaho.
Eliza Hart was born August 11, 1807 to Levi Hart and Martha Hart (they were first cousins) in Kensington, Connecticut. In 1820 the family moved to Oneida County, New York. She was introduced to Henry by a mutual acquaintance who said that Henry "wanted to correspond with a young lady."[2] The couple were pen pals for about a year, and the relationship quickly deepened after they met in the fall of 1831. Eliza was as interested in participating in missionary work as was Spalding. They married on October 13, 1833 in Hudson, New York.
Mission in the west
The Spaldings searched for a missionary station through the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and were initially assigned to the Osage in Missouri. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman knew Henry, as they had attended the same church in Prattsburgh, New York in the 1820s. Henry met Marcus Whitman in December 1835, and in February 1836 persuaded him to go instead to the Oregon Country. After praying on it, Eliza agreed. On February 29 in Pittsburgh they boarded the steamboat Arabian for Cincinnati, arriving four days later, where they waited for the Whitmans. On March 22 they all boarded the steamboat Junius to St. Louis. Changing to the Majestic in mid-trip to avoid travel on the sabbath, they arrived March 29. Two days later they boarded another boat to Liberty, Missouri, with the journey taking another week.
In Liberty, the missionary group waited for the rest of their travel party, a group of fur traders with whom they would travel as far as the continental divide. After some logistical complications, on May 25 they joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company caravan led by mountain men Milton Sublette and Thomas Fitzpatrick.[3] The fur traders had seven wagons, each pulled by six mules. An additional cart drawn by two mules carried Sublette, who had lost a leg a year earlier and walked on a "cork" leg made by a friend. The combined group arrived at the fur-trader's rendezvous on July 6. Eliza and Narcissa were the first Euro-American women to make this overland trip.
In July 1836, while the company paused at the Rendezvous in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, Spalding wrote a letter to a fellow minister and newspaper editor about the journey west. The letter, preserved in a transcript by the "Library of Western Fur Trade Historical Source Documents", provides one of the earliest first hand accounts about the route west and conditions found during this journey across the North American continent.
The Pacific northwest
Leaving the association of the fur traders, the group of missionaries continued on to the Pacific Northwest. They reached Fort Hall on August 3, and Fort Boise (near Caldwell, Idaho) on August 19. Eleven days later they were at Fort Walla Walla, then operated by the Canada-based Hudson's Bay Company. After a trip further down the Columbia to Fort Vancouver for supplies, they backed down the trail to Lapwai near present-day Lewiston, Idaho. The Spaldings finally settled into their new home on November 29, 1836. The Whitman party continued on to establish a mission in Waiilatpu, Washington.
When the Spaldings established their mission to the Nez Perce, they also established the first white home in what is today the state of Idaho. They were also responsible, in 1839, for bringing the first printing press into the territory. Spalding was generally successful in his interaction with the Nez Perce,
Eliza Spalding was very well liked by the Nez Perce peoples, whose women often followed her around her home wanting to see how the "white woman" cooked, cleaned, dressed, and cared for her children. She was quickly liked by them and respected for her courage and for her attempts to act as a buffer between the Nez Perce and Henry, who was not always as well liked. He was inflexible on gambling, liquor, and polygamy and reproved many people and even went as far as whipping some Nez Perce or having them whip each other. This led to him being ridiculed and denounced by some. Henry was the opposite of Eliza in his relationship with the Nez Perce; where she sought to understand them, he sought for them to understand him.[4] Similarly, the relationships with Spalding's fellow missionaries were also less than ideal. Amid criticism by Whitman and others in the region, Spalding was dismissed by the American Board in 1842, although he never left his mission or stopped his missionary work. He was reinstated following a review by the Board
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