Historian Marc James Carpenter’s 2025 book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, focuses primarily on pioneer conflicts with various native Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s through the 1850s. The height of the conflict was in 1855-1856. Violence continued sporadically into the 1860s. So far, scholarly analysis of Carpenter’s book seems to be positive. Historians of the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous history, and settler colonialism generally see this book as empirically solid and historically significant. The C-Span series American History TV broadcast an hour lecture by Carpenter talking about his book. Link
A 2020 article Carpenter wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, V. 121(2), pp. 156-185, Pioneer Problems: “Wanton Murder”, Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History, gives a nice overview of the whole picture his research is focused on.
In Illahee, Carpenter has meticulously documented (85 pages of detailed footnotes) a horror story of indescribable savagery and sadness. This book is almost as ghastly as Conrad’s fictional tale (based on real events) of human brutality in his 1899 book, Heart of Darkness, about Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State.
Carpenter spent years researching for this book. To some extent this book challenges some of current spun history about the conflicts. Carpenter found a significant source of about untold events and new information about distorted events in pioneer sources who disagreed among themselves about how to spin what they had done. They wanted to portray murdering white pioneers as heroic innocent people struggling to survive in the face of implacable hostility from native American Indians.
About Illahee, the homeland
Carpenter intentionally tells the history of conflict and death as a widespread war composed of many small to moderate sized conflicts, some of which were given individual names that describe single conflict events as a “war”. Illahee does not refer to any Indian tribe or polity. It is a term that was generally understood among most white pioneers and Northwest Indian tribes to mean “homeland”. Indian tribes and white pioneers believed they were fighting for their rightful homelands. The Indians believed that they owned the land because they had always lived there. By contrast, the pioneers believed it was their land due to either God’s divine will, or because white domination and Indian elimination was inevitable. The dominant pioneer belief was that the Indians were entitled to nothing, including their physical existence. They were subhuman, and therefore owned no land and had no inviolate rights whatsoever.
The few whites who wanted to coexist peacefully with the Indians were seen at best as complicit with Indians, but more likely seen as traitors against the US. Despite their hostility toward co-existence believers, the pioneers in power stopped just short of imprisoning or killing them. But that is what they wanted to do.
Indian treaties: An illusion
Carpenter is blunt that Indian treaties were a shame right from the get go. The dominant pioneer intent was to use treaties to incrementally exterminate all Indians and take their land. In 1884, a former gold miner and soldier, Francis Henry, then a judge, told a gathering of pioneers that the Pacific Northwest Indian wars were:
“but the inevitable continuation of the old story of the colonization and occupation of America by the whites, which has been enacted times without number from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, during the last four hundred years. [It was] simply one of the three incidents of that inevitable destiny which has already subjected the whole continent to the use of civilized man, namely: First, the insidious invasion of the pioneer; second, a treaty by the government with the Indians; and third, their forcible expulsion from that territory to convenient reservations, to be taken from them by the same process at some future time.”
Worse than that, the idea that there was “treaty by the government” is an exaggeration. Local thugs, officials and US military went off on their own, slaughtered or captured Indians and then “negotiated” a treaty that the US government never ratified. Treaty negotiations were routinely fortified by the persuasive tactic of threatening the surviving Indians with total annihilation if they did not agree to whatever terms white people imposed. Death threats were routine, explicit and blunt.
White pioneer war tactics
As one might expect, white brutality was ghastly. Captured Indians were sometimes murdered, with the excuse they were trying to escape. Many or most of those killings were just in cold blood with no reason. When Indians retaliated or tried to defend themselves from unprovoked attack, whites routinely spun that as innocent white people being viciously attacked for no reason. That was fairly common. It was used to justify horrific slaughter of Indians by pioneers.
In their attacks on Indians, pioneers almost never checked to see if the people they were attacking and killing were among those alleged to have attacked or threatened pioneers. The pioneers saw all Indians as a one undifferentiated group. There was routine killings of members of a tribe with no connections to any pioneer threat or conflict. All the Indians looked alike and they were treated alike. “Wrong place, wrong time” turned out to be a lethal reality for a lot of murdered Indians.
In 1855, volunteer pioneer militias in Oregon rampaged aimlessly across the land, attacking nearly all groups of Indian they happened to come across. Although they were largely incompetent in their war effort, they still posed an existential threat to Indian communities. On Dec. 5, 1855, Walla Walla Indian leader and diplomat Yellow Bird (Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox) carrying a truce flag approached pioneers to negotiate a treaty. He was hoping to save what was left of his people from annihilation. The pioneers ignored the truce signal and captured him and killed his treaty party. That touched off running battles. That led the pioneers to murder Yellow Bird, scalp him and cut is body into pieces for trophies. The murder was excused because his killers claimed he was trying to escape. Official accounts from the nominal commander, James Kelly, simply ignored the fact that Yellow Bird came in peace trying to negotiate a treaty.
Yellow Bird (Pew pew mas mas [sic])
Conclusion
Carpenter’s book goes on and on like this for 284 pages. Trigger warning: This book is not for the faint of heart.
A final point. Some of the pioneer leaders of the carnage went on to be state governors, US Senators and other ranking officials. The histories of Oregon and Washington are loaded with people who were, by modern standards, war criminals, virulent racists or both. Some were stone cold killers who won their influence purely on the basis of their savagery. The history they told is very different from the history Carpenter tells. Who is a person to believe?
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