The tribe gained wide notoriety in the early days of the white settlement of the territory. In 1838, Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa established a mission among the Cayuse at "Waiilatpu" ("Place of the Rye Grass"), a site about seven miles from the present-day city of Walla Walla and about a quarter mile east of where the Cayuse "Pásxa" winter village was located. In 1847, a measles epidemic, suspected by some to be contracted from white settlers, resulted in high fatalities among the tribe. A small group of Cayuse, after putting Witmans medicine to the test with both sick and non sick individuals, and which all test individuals died, believed the missionaries were deliberately poisoning their native people, since a much higher percentage of the natives were dying from the measles than were the whites. (Native Americans had no immunity to the endemic Eurasian diseases carried by European Americans.) In addition, cultural differences and settler encroachment had caused growing tensions.