NONFICTION - Oct. 6, 1991

CONVERTING THE WEST by Julie Roy Jeffrey (The Oklahoma Western Biographies: $24.95; 256 pp.) Narcissa Whitman was the only woman killed in an 1847 massacre of whites by the Cayuse Indians. She and her husband had traveled to Washington State from New York to convert the Indians to Christianity, but they met with little success; indeed, according to this biography, the Indians resented the family’s haughty attitude, particularly Narcissa’s tendency to keep herself and her children at a distance. Whitman has always been considered something of a martyr, but Jeffrey attempts to humanize her, to present a more complex portrait. She considers Whitman a romanticist who attained her dream of missionary life, only to realize, too late, that she was not well-suited to the unpredictable dangers of frontier life.