Cayuse Tribe

Cayuse Tribe

The Cayuse Indians were once masters of a vast homeland of more than six million acres in what is now Washington and Oregon. The first of the Northwest tribes to acquire horses, they were relatively few in number but outsized in influence, noted for their shrewd bargaining ability and much feared as warriors. Fur trader Alexander Ross (1783-1856) described them as "by far the most powerful and warlike" of the tribes on the Columbia Plateau in 1818. They were at the peak of their power in 1836, when they invited Marcus (1802-1847) and Narcissa (1808-1847) Whitman to establish a mission on Cayuse land near Walla Walla. What began as accommodation ended in disillusionment and resentment. A group of Cayuse attacked the mission in November 1847, killing the Whitmans and 11 others -- a brief flurry of violence that led to the first Indian war in the Northwest, the creation of Oregon Territory as a federal entity, and, eventually, a treaty that stripped the tribe of most of its land. But that was not the end of the story. As historian Clifford Trafzer has pointed out, "Their lives did not end in the last century, and their cultures did not fade away" (Trafzer, 7). The Cayuse survive as part of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, with a 172,000-acre reservation near Pendleton, Oregon; an annual operating budget of nearly $230 million; and businesses ranging from a casino to a wind farm. In the words of a tribal brochure, "We are still here. We will continue to be here."