Conversation so far:
why did Whitman make his way west?
On May 25, 1836, the Whitmans, and a group of other missionaries including Henry and Eliza Spalding, joined a caravan of fur traders and traveled west.
were they going out there to be missionaries, too?
The group established several missions as well as Whitman's settlement at a Cayuse settlement called Waiilatpu .

Question: did they have a lot of followers?
Self-contained rewrite: did the fur traders have a lot of followers?