We all know that momentous events can happen in a small space.

It’s true of many rooms, of course – Independence Hall and Ford’s Theatre come to mind – but I feel it in a different way at Whitman Mission National Historic Site in Southeast Washington. I’m out in the open, reading a sign, with the Blue Mountains to my left and the Snake River off to my right. Vast spaces, and yet so much of their historic place in our nation was settled on the patch of grass before me.

I am looking at the outline of the mission house where in 1847 a few Cayuse Indians – their people terrorized by measles and not ignorant of the meaning of the Oregon Trail running just a few yards away – lashed out at these first white settlers. That the mission no longer stands, that all we have is an excavated outline, only serves to open up the events.

Here the pioneering missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, along with about a dozen others, were murdered – he in the kitchen, she outside the house, just inches away. Their deaths rallied the nation, inspiring Congress to create the first formal U.S. territory west of the Rockies, and all but ended not only the power of the Cayuse, but the area’s long-established British contingent, as well.

At the time there was only that one road – the trail – in sight, but a rudimentary knowledge of the Whitman saga draws far flung arrows from over the horizon: from St. Louis, where a decade before four Nez Perce men had ridden nearly 2,000 miles to ask for Bibles; from New York, where the Whitmans felt the missionary call; from Boston, where they found their backers; and finally, from the west and the Willamette Valley, where vengeful men, incensed by the deaths here, declared war on the Cayuse and their neighbors. All these intentions arc and fall on this grassy spot, rebound, and then fly out again to become the next part of the story: The fading of the Native Americans, statehood for Washington and Oregon, a memorial, a national park site.

I climb the memorial hill, look down on the little patch of green, and feel it all the more. Then I wonder about that word “settle,” and all the ways it can be played: From those who sought to tame the land and its original people, to the impulse to resolve issues once and for all, and to our own far perspective, where pain and grievances no longer burn, but issues of justice and mercy remain unsettled, after all.