The Cayuse Five: A Trial Without Cayuse Voices
Washington
The killing at the Whitman Mission in November of eighteen forty-seven triggered a United States military response. The Cayuse War dragged on for years, with the most intense fighting easing around eighteen fifty. American forces moved into the Walla Walla Valley. The Cayuse faced military pressure, and then famine. Their territory was opening to settlement faster than they could resist.
In eighteen fifty, the Cayuse nation made a decision. To end the war, to relieve military pressure on the nation as a whole, five men were surrendered to United States authorities for trial: Tiloukaikt, Tomahas, Klokamas, Iaiachalakis, and Kiamasumkin. They were transported to Oregon City, the provisional capital of Oregon Territory, and placed before a tribunal.
No Cayuse voice spoke in their defense. No tribal testimony was entered into the record. The proceedings were conducted entirely in English, by American officials, under American law. The Cayuse oral tradition, as documented and preserved by tribal historians, holds that the five men who surrendered were not necessarily the individuals personally responsible for the November killings. They were given up because the nation's survival required the war to stop.
All five were convicted. On June third, eighteen fifty, they were hanged in Oregon City. The Cayuse War ended. The Walla Walla Valley opened to accelerated white settlement within the decade. The Cayuse people are today enrolled members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, whose tribal government and cultural programs have worked for generations to maintain the record of what those five men, and the nation that surrendered them, endured.
The executions of June third, eighteen fifty, are documented by historians as the first capital punishment carried out under American law in the Oregon Territory. No Cayuse voice was present at the trial. What their names meant to their nation, what the decision to surrender them cost, that knowledge belongs to the Cayuse people's own oral tradition, not to the American legal record that ended their lives.
