Walla Walla: Where the Oregon Trail Ended in Fire

Walla Walla sits in a broad valley where the Blue Mountains release their waters onto the Columbia Plateau, and for thousands of years the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples made this valley their home. The name itself is a Nez Perce word meaning small rapid rivers.

The first Americans to build here permanently were Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Presbyterian missionaries who arrived in eighteen thirty-six and established a mission called Waiilatpu, meaning place of rye grass, about seven miles west of today's city. The Whitmans intended to convert the Cayuse to Christianity and farming. Instead they became a rest stop. Beginning in eighteen forty-three the Oregon Trail funneled thousands of emigrants through the mission each year, and the Whitmans fed, housed, and doctored them.

The epidemics the emigrants carried were catastrophic. A measles outbreak in eighteen forty-seven killed roughly half of the Cayuse who lived near the mission while the white emigrants survived at much higher rates. The Cayuse followed a practice in which a medicine man who failed his patients could be killed. On November twenty-ninth, eighteen forty-seven, a group of Cayuse men attacked the mission, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others over several days. About fifty survivors were held hostage for a month before the Hudson's Bay Company ransomed them.

The Whitman Massacre, as Americans named it, set off the Cayuse War and accelerated the creation of Oregon Territory as a formal United States possession. A military fort, Fort Walla Walla, was established on the site of present-day Walla Walla in eighteen fifty-six, and a town grew around it, incorporated in eighteen sixty-two.

The town spent a century as an agricultural service center and home of the Washington State Penitentiary, famous for its sweet onions and not much else. Then, in nineteen seventy-seven, Gary Figgins bonded Leonetti Cellar, producing the first wines that would launch the Walla Walla Valley into the front rank of American wine regions. The valley was designated an American Viticultural Area in nineteen eighty-four. Today more than one hundred wineries operate in the valley, making wine from Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah grown in volcanic soil at elevations that produce cool nights and long ripening seasons.

The town is also home to Whitman College, founded in eighteen eighty-three in memory of the missionaries, a small liberal arts school that consistently ranks among the finest undergraduate institutions in the Pacific Northwest.