Marriage and Family
In 1836, Whitman married Narcissa Prentiss, a teacher of physics and chemistry. Narcissa had also been eager to travel west as a missionary, but she had been unable to do so as a single woman. They had one daughter, Alice Clarissa, born On March 14, 1837, the first Anglo-American child born in Oregon Country. She was named after her two grandmothers. She drowned in the Walla Walla River at age two.
As settlers came in increasing numbers, the Whitmans took in eleven orphaned children, adopting eight from one family whose parents had died. They also established a kind of boarding school for settlers' children at their mission.
Read more about this topic: Marcus Whitman
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?—as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)