Eliza Spalding Warren

Eliza Spalding Warren was born at Lapwai in 1837, the daughter of missionaries Henry Harmon Spalding and Eliza Hart Spalding. She grew up at the Spalding mission among the Nez Perce and, as a child attending school at the Whitman mission, witnessed the violence there in 1847.

Warren later became an autobiographical writer, speaker and preserver of family records. Her Memoirs of the West: The Spaldings , published late in her life, assembled her recollections with letters, diary material and other documents and became an important first-person source for the history of the missions and the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest.

In Jane Kirkpatrick’s The Memory Weaver, Eliza Spalding Warren survived captivity after the 1847 attack on the Whitman mission, but adulthood has not freed her from memories formed as a frightened child.