Authored in 1918 by Whitman College professor William Denison Lyman, Lyman's History of Old Walla Walla County is an expansive, subscription-based chronicle of the agricultural and civic development of southeastern Washington. The multi-volume work traces the region's transformation from the fiercely contested era of early fur traders to its establishment as the prosperous, wheat-producing epicenter of the Inland Empire. Intertwining the history of early Protestant missionaries with hundreds of flattering biographical sketches of local pioneer patriarchs, the text actively mythologizes the Anglo-American conquest of the Columbia Basin. Typical of early twentieth-century regional literature, the book functions simultaneously as a sweeping civic monument and a commercial vanity project for the area's ruling merchant and agricultural elites. A keen insight drawn from the work is how early historians weaponized the trauma of pioneer martyrdom to morally anchor the colonization process; by framing the 1847 Whitman Massacre as a holy sacrifice that explicitly consecrated the land for white civilization, Lyman's narrative effectively rebranded the subsequent violent dispossession of the Cayuse and Walla Walla peoples as a righteous, divinely ordained destiny rather than an act of aggressive territorial conquest.