The Whitman Massacre Trial: 1850 - The Trial Begins

On Thursday morning, in selecting a jury, prosecutor Holbrook dismissed two of the 24 summoned prospects and the defense eliminated 20. So, Marshall Meek had to collar more prospects from the spectators. Although Cayuse tribesmen were in the audience, all of the 12 jurors chosen were white men, as was required by law.

The prosecutor called four witnesses: all former white residents at the mission and survivors of the massacre and a month of captivity. The purpose of their testimonies was to identify the five defendants as being tribesmen involved in the violence of that tragic day.

The defense called three witnesses: John McLoughlin, head of the Hudson's Bay trading company in Oregon; Reverend Henry Spalding, a fellow missionary of the Whitmans; and Stickus, a Cayuse Indian chief. McLoughlin testified that for years prior to the incident he had warned Whitman to leave the mission because the Cayuse were increasingly angered by his inability to cure them of the white man's diseases and by the shifting of his attention and care away from the tribe and toward the growing number of his fellow countrymen who brought those diseases along the ever-invasive Oregon Trail. Spalding testified that he and Whitman (visiting down the Columbia River) were warned on the day prior to the killings not to return to Cayuse country. Chief Stickus would have testified about the Cayuse custom of killing medicine men when their cures proved ineffective. But Judge Pratt refused to allow Cayuse law to be injected in a case tried under U.S. law. None of the defendants testified.