Just Over Jordan

In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding became the first white families to travel what would soon become the Oregon Trail. After harsh vicissitudes, they settled respectively among the Cayuse and Nez Perce Nations around the Walla Walla and Clearwater Rivers. Here in an isolation splendid and terrible they undertake the “conversion” of their host peoples, unwittingly paving the way for the Indians’ destruction at the hands of a legion of white pioneers.



Rev. Spalding narrates this historical novel in a voice darkened and made hauntingly beautiful by his bitter experience of illegitimacy and fatherlessness, striving for self-realization, rebirth in the arms of an uncompromising religion, and love for an angel in human form named Narcissa Prentiss. Rejected, he hurls himself passionately into the missionary quest in partnership with Dr. Whitman, his opposite nature, manly and likeable, who takes as his wife for the new life in Oregon the very woman whom Spalding now despises as much as he adores.



Narcissa dominates this narrative as she dominated all minds who took her in. Her final tragedy is made more poignant by the fundamental decency of the people who called to her, the Nez Perce Indians. “What was Thy aim,” prays Henry Spalding, “in sending such lovely heathens to solicit ministers who could not even love each other? Was it to make our ugliness complete?”