Eliza Hart Spalding

Eliza Hart Spalding was an American Protestant missionary who travelled overland to the Pacific Northwest in the 1830s with her husband Henry Harmon Spalding. They established a mission among the Nez Perce at Lapwai, where she taught, learned aspects of the local language and participated in one of the earliest sustained Protestant mission projects in the inland Northwest.

Eliza Hart Spalding also worked as Missionary. The historical importance of Eliza Hart Spalding also reflects the institutional and political setting of religious authority, where doctrine, patronage and public power were often closely connected.

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.