Memorialized as a godly champion of manifest destiny, Marcus Whitman was in fact "a mediocre missionary whose most significant contribution to history was getting killed."
Washington State has replaced one of its statues in the US Capitol Statuary hall, that celebrated missionary Marcus Whitman, with one honoring Native American treaty rights advocate Billy Frank, Jr.
The same period that saw the public affirmation of the Confederate Lost Cause myth saw a proliferation of monuments that portrayed the conquest of the indigenous people of the west as virtuous pioneering. The case of Marcus Whitman shows a national reckoning is in order.
