TOLD by the PIONEERS - Washington Secretary of State

Told by the Pioneers
style of The President and Trustees of Whitman Seminary."
The establishment of this institution was due to the prophetic foresight
of Rev. Cushing Eells, a missionary of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who had come to the Pacific
Northwest in 1838 and taught among the Spokane Indians at Tshimakain
'until the Whitman massacre on November 29, 1847, drove him
and his family to take refuge in the Willamette Valley. As soon as
the Ullited States War Department permitted white settlers to return
to the"upper country," after ten years of Indian war, Rev. Eells
hastened to the Walla Walla valley where the Whitman mission had
been established in 1836. The valley was empty of settlers and the
only t.rare of the former prosperous mission was a gTeat neglected
grave where the bodies of the thirteen victims of the massacre had
been buried. A regiment of U. S. soldiers was stationed at Fort Walla
VvalIa, six miles to the eastward and a few settlers had begun to
come ,timidly into the fertile region, but in June, 1859, there was little
indication of the coming rush of settlers which soon made the Walla
'Valla country the most populous portion of the territory.
Standing by the grave of his friends, Dr. and ::\Irs. :Marcus Whitman,
Eells dedicated himself in the sight of God to the founding of a
suitable monument in their honor; he decided that a school for the
proper education of the boys and girls, who, he felt, would some day
fill that. region, would be the worthiest memorial. His faith was justified
bv .. the course of historv. ..,.....
Within a veal' the city of 'Valla Walla
had sprung up close to the army post and had become the largest center
of population in the Territory; it remained so for twenty-five
veal's.
.'
Mr. Eells expected to establish the Seminary at the old Mission
site, Waiilatpu, but the rapid development of the town made it sensible
to build the school there. Instruct.ion actually began on October
13, 1866, in a little two-story, wooden school house half a mile east of
the town's business center on land given by the town's richest and
most influential citizen, Dr. D. S. Baker. Rev. P. B. Chamberlain
was the first principal. Thereafter, for the next sixteen years, the
Whitman Seminary maintained high standards of scholarship and
character in a fast growing western town where the desire for riches
was the general motive. In a community where there were few college
graduates to be found it always had as its principal a graduate
of one of the best colleges or universities of the nation, Harvard, Yale,
Pennsylvania, Williams, Oberlin, and the like while the assistant
teachers were men and women of good training and character. It
was really aNew England academy such as Cushing Eells himself
had attended during his boyhood in Massachusetts and like the Ter-
217