Great Secrets of Our National Parks
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By: TW Editors 06/01/2008
Walla Walla, WA
Forgotten Grave at Whitman Mission?
Has anyone ever found the grave of the Whitmans’ only child?
National Park Service folks certainly searched for it, back in the late 1960s.
The story of the drowning of two-year-old Alice Clarissa would put tears in anyone’s eyes, as shared in the distraught mother’s letters sent home to her parents and sister.
The afternoon of June 23, 1839, Narcissa was settled into her reading, as Margaret McKay set the table for the evening meal. “Mama, supper is almost ready; let Alice get some water,” Narcissa recalled Alice saying to her. “This was like a shadow that passed across my mind,” she wrote, “[It] passed away and made no impression.”
With the meal ready, no one could find Alice, just two cups floating in the river. An image of Alice taking the cups with her flashed across Narcissa’s mind. She ran to the river; her husband Marcus behind her. Their daughter’s lifeless body floated by.
The grieving parents buried their only child in view of the Mission House, which Narcissa marked on a map she sent to her father. In 1847, a mass grave would hold the remains of Narcissa and Marcus, and others killed by local Indians during the massacre.
The search for Alice’s grave began in 1959, with the aid of the map, indicating that the grave was probably at the base of Shaft Hill, somewhere near the mass grave. National Park Service archaeologist Paul Schumacher found a grave in 1961, but it contained the body of an Indian.
In 1968, a marker dedicated to Alice was placed near the Indian’s grave site. Later that year, park ranger Larry Dodd found a letter written in 1888 by massacre survivor Matilda Sager, who placed Alice’s grave closer to the mass grave, “where the parents and their only child would lie side by side.” Even though the park service’s archival history of this finding indicates the marker should have been moved closer to the mass graves, it is still presently found in its 1968 location.
No matter all the conjecture about where Alice’s grave site may be, the reality is the location remains a mystery; to the best of our knowledge, no one has used modern-day tools to try to locate it.
Baby Alice exists today solely through her grieving mother’s letters. Narcissa’s words are all we need when we sit at the Whitman Mission, along the Walla Walla River, watching two cups float by in our minds.
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