Pierce and Washington Governor Louis F. Hart. Legacy and myths Recent scholarship has helped to understand the origins of myths regarding the Whitman Massacre. In 2021, Blaine Harden published "Murder at the Mission" to explore how the Whitman massacre myth was created by an erratic, self-promoting Henry Harmon Spalding who avoided the massacre. Although Spalding had "periodic bouts of irrationality" and "fellow missionaries wrote countless letters about his erratic, spiteful, and annoying behavior," he was able to persuade the US Senate to print an official pamphlet in 1871 about Whitman. Spalding falsely claimed that Whitman had in 1842 travelled by horse across the country to the White House to warn president John Tyler of a British, Catholic, and Native American plot to "steal" Oregon. He also claimed that the British and Catholics had persuaded the Cayuses to kill Whitman. These myths were debunked in 1901 but Washington state still sent Whitman's statue to the U.S. Capitol in 1953. In 2021, Whitman College discontinued the nickname "the missionaries" for its athletes. Colleges and towns have debated removal of statues of Whitman. The city of Walla Walla (WA) is considering removal of the statue, while the statue of Whitman in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol was removed and replaced by a statue honoring tribal treaty activist Billy Frank Jr. in 2021. After some persuasion by Chuck Sams, the first Native American director of the National Park Service (NPS), Whitman College announced that they will offer five full scholarships to students from the Umatilla Reservation where Cayuse Tribal members live. Whitman Mission National Historic Site was established in 1936 to preserve the location of the mission and surrounding land. In 1997, the NPS stopped referring to the historical event as the "Whitman massacre" calling it the "Tragedy at Waiilatpu" in an attempt to more neutrally and holistically describe not only the murder of the Whitmans, but the events that led to it, and the trial of the Cayuse people. Numerous scholars have used the NPS terminology and written about the incidents at length in an attempt to re-frame descriptions of the events more objectively. See also Walla Walla expeditions, spread of disease which preceded the massacre References William Henry Gray, A History of Oregon, 1792–1849, drawn from personal observation and authentic information ... , Harris and Holman: 1870, pp. 464, MOA Further reading Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy