Tate, a former journalist who worked for papers in the Northwest before earning a PhD in history at the University of Washington in 1995, has written a convincing tale of misery and ultimate failure of the mission. The result is a highly readable, myth-busting, fact-based story of what happened, and more important, why it happened. But she then steps back from the gruesome killing to dissect with deep research the story, the people and the place where cultures collided with deadly results. In this book by Cassandra Tate, the author tells the well-known story of the tragic fate of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and seven others - five men and two teenage boys. The story told in Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West begins three decades earlier when Marcus Whitman came west to scout locations for a Presbyterian mission. T his book review serves as a postscript to the recent Inlander issue that examined the bloody history of racism in the Inland Northwest due to the incursion of Confederacy loyalists after the Civil War.
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