Believed to have been built in 1837 by Hudson's Bay traders for a Cayuse leader called the Prince, this cabin is thought to be the oldest standing cabin in Washington. It originally stood at a Cayuse wintering place just upstream of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman's Presbyterian mission, two miles east of the Frenchtown Historic Site. Narcissa Whitman referred to it in a January 1944 letter about an immigrant family moving from the crowded mission building to the Prince's house up the river. After the killing of the Whitmans in 1847 and during the ensuing war of 1855, the village site and the cabin were likely abandoned. The Smith family acquired the land and cabin around 1888, and oral history indicates the cabin may have been moved from its original location across water, perhaps early on when Marcus Whitman rerouted part of the river for his mill race. However, by 1860 the first Government Land Office survey noted a house on the precise spot where the cabin stood when Kriss and Robin Peterson purchased the property in 1990. Robin Peterson recognized the cabin as a fur trade relic and began researching its origins and construction, and in 2013 Kriss Peterson donated it to the Frenchtown Historical Foundation to be moved, restored, and interpreted at the historic site. In 1855 the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla Indian Tribes signed a treaty ceding more than 6.4 million acres of what is now northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington to the United States, including the Frenchtown area. Although Congress ratified the treaty in 1859, the last Cayuse in this area were not forced off the land until 1861, when white settlers demanded their removal and threatened to hang hostages if they stayed. That same year, Albert and Elizabeth Blanchard laid claim to the property where the cabin still stood, and after the Homestead Act of 1862 officially opened the land for settlement, they filed their land patent in Vancouver, Washington, in 1866.