As the new wife of a missionary to the Cayuse Indians in Oregon, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman was one of the first two white women to cross the Rocky Mountains. Her journals and letters provide historic insight into life on the frontier. The New York-born daughter of a judge, Whitman settled into a cabin in the Walla Walla area, where, after her own daughter died, she raised eleven adopted children until her death in an 1847 massacre.
