Providence and the Invention of American History by Sarah Koenig

Abstract

Reviewed by: Providence and the Invention of American History by Sarah Koenig Marc James Carpenter PROVIDENCE AND THE INVENTION OF AMERICAN HISTORY by Sarah Koenig Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2021. Photographs, notes, index. 296 pages. $45.00 cloth. In Providence and the Invention of American History, Sarah Koenig usefully brings the lens of church history to bear on early struggles over the legacy of Oregon’s pioneer past, focusing on the rise and partial fall of patriotic legends related to a particularly unsuccessful and racist missionary, Marcus Whitman. His execution by a small band of Cayuse in 1847 was used as an excuse for American settlers’ first war on Native people in Oregon; after his death, pioneers and proselytizers turned Whitman into a martyr, “a God-ordained hero of both Christianity and American expansion” (p. 13). Providential historians seeking to “envision the West as a Christian region, despite ample evidence to the contrary,” bolted increasingly unlikely patriotic deeds onto Whitman’s legacy, eventually crediting the failed missionary with having single-handedly “saved” Oregon from falling into the hands of the British (p. 15). The myths they created were subsequently disassembled by historians more reliant on documentary evidence (first regionally, then nationally), but the myth maintained as part of popular history and memory. Koenig’s book is a tightly focused monograph on the “creation, growth, and eventual disproving of the Whitman story,” framed as emblematic of “divides still present in American historical consciousness” (p. 4–5). This book is vital reading for scholars focusing on memory and historians specializing in [End Page 402] nineteenth century Oregon. The Whitman killings themselves are among the most trodden fields of historical debate in the Northwest, but Koenig breaks new ground examining the nonprofessional historians who developed, curated, and defended mythic histories of the missionary, particularly his fellow missionaries, conspiracy theorist Henry Harmon Spalding and peripatetic politician William Henry Gray. Koenig argues that Gray’s “pioneer providentialism” — the notion that Oregon was divinely ordained to be peopled by “rugged, determined individuals [who] triumph over both foreign influences and complacent structures of authority for the good of the nation and Protestant Christianity” — was influential not only in the 1860s, when Gray was a leader in setting up the earliest Pacific Northwest pioneer societies, but for decades afterwards (p. 103). Her chapter on “Selling Providence” shows how this mythmaking was adapted to popular imperial ends by the 1890s, with Whitman transformed (first by Gray and then by journalist Oliver Wood-son Nixon) from a besuited missionary martyr to a buckskin-clad rough-and-ready. Koenig traces a parallel story of Whitman debunkers, discussing a long line of scholars employing objectivity as a stance and a weapon in battles over the assertions and distortions regarding Whitman. Long before formal professionalization of American history, Koenig demonstrates, would-be historians such as Oregon Catholic missionary Jean-Baptiste Brouillet used objectivity as a “deft rhetorical move” to illuminate (or imply) the biases of critics and frame one’s own arguments as neutral (p. 72). This set of tools was available to all — the most compelling chapter of the book, “Debunking Providence,” shows how providentialists, too, used “objectivity as a matter of public performance as well as of unbiased inquiry” (p. 182). Early attackers of Whitman myths, such as local historian Francis Fuller Victor and public speaker William Isaac Marshall, had a preponderance of evidence on their side but were unable to break through until Yale historian Edward Gaylord Bourne made their research part of his definitive debunking in 1900, from a position of professional privilege. Even after being conclusively disproven, Koenig shows, the Whitman-Saved-Oregon myth and the broader practice of “pioneer providentialism” held on in popular history — preserved in local pioneer tales, regional monuments, and nationally in the speeches of President Warren Harding in the 1920s and the writings of Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan into the 1990s and beyond. Koenig notes that “religion is curiously absent” from many studies of Western mythology and Western history, using battles over the Whitman myths to argue that “providentialism was as significant as European intellectual currents in shaping historians’ moral visions of the American West” (p. 11). She effectively...