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NTS OF 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 VS. 
 
 The Whitman Saved Oregon 
 Story 
 
 Three Essays towards a true history of the Acquisition 
 of the old Oregon Territory (being nearly one-twelfth 
 of all our domain on this continent ), which was the 
 longest, the most remarkable — and when truthfully 
 told — the most interesting struggle we have ever made 
 for territory. 
 
 WILLIAM I. MARSHALL 
 
 Principal of the Wm. E. Gladstone School, Chicago 
 Member American Historical Association 
 
 Cloth 50 cts., Paper 25 cts. 
 
 Press of the Blakely Printing Co., Chicago 
 1904 
 
F820 
 M2.3 
 
 Copyright, 1902, 1903, 1904 
 By WILLIAM I. MARSHALL 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 HENRY MORSE STEfHEflBI 
 
tUL. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A crrpaf- amnnnt r\i iinpvnprtprl wnrtr ronnp^tprl with school 
 
 CORRECTIONS 
 
 Page 3. I find that a newspaper sketch of Mr. Harvey W. 
 Scott (on which I depended) was incorrect in stating that he 
 was a native of the old Oregon Territory, whereas he was born 
 in Illinois, in 1838, and with his parents migrated to the old 
 Oregon Territory when a boy of 14; but as all his subsequent 
 education in school and college was in that region with which 
 his life has now been closely identified for more than half a 
 century, he is, for all practical purposes as much of an "Ore- 
 gonian," as if he had first beheld the light there. 
 
 Page 17. Fifteenth line from the bottom, e was omitted 
 after W. It should read, "We felt that," etc. 
 
 Page 66. Third line, May 26 should be May 16. 
 
 Page 83. Since publishing this book I have learned that Dr. 
 Silas Reed was within a few weeks of 78 years old when he 
 wrote this letter to Prest. L. G. Tyler. 
 
 Page 91. Twenty-fifth line, "was" should be changed to 
 "way," so that it will read, "and in every way as worthless 
 historically. ' ' 
 
 It will be noticed that not one of these trifling "inac- 
 curacies," (which are the only ones yet either discovered by me, 
 or reported to me by the few hostile critics who have attacked 
 the book), has the slightest bearing on any question relating to 
 the Whitman Legend. 
 
 If any one discovers any inaccuracy— typographical or other- 
 wise—in any of my writings, I shall be greatly obliged if notice 
 of the same is promptly mailed to me. 
 
 WM. I. MARSHALL. 
 
 August 21, 1905. 
 
 without solicitation he wrote and put at the head of his edi- 
 torial page his opinion of it, in the editorial reprinted on page 
 7 infra. 
 
 Several of the topics in the " Strange Treatment" being also 
 treated in the review of Rev. M. Eells' "Reply," it seemed 
 best, when printing these two essays together, to somewhat 
 amplify those topics in the "Strange Treatment" as it was 
 
 510068 
 
F820 
 
 M£3 
 
dJL. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 A great amount of unexpected work connected with school 
 affairs making it necessary for me to defer the publication of 
 my "History of the Acquisition of the Old Oregon Territory 
 and the Long-Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman" 
 (which I had intended to publish before May 15, 1904) till 
 the autumn of 1904, so that I may have the summer vaca- 
 tion to carefully re-examine all its numerous quotations and 
 compare them with the originals, and to complete a very full 
 index to it, I have decided to issue a limited edition of these 
 three essays, more especially for the information of some writers 
 whose study of the long struggle for nearly one-twelfth of all 
 our domain on this continent has been so exceedingly super- 
 ficial, that they are willing to accept such aggregations of blun- 
 ders as Dr. Mowry's "Marcus Whitman," and Rev. Dr. Eells' 
 "Reply to Professor Bourne," and Barrows' "Oregon," and 
 Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," and Craig- 
 head's "Story of Marcus Whitman," as trustworthy historical 
 authorities. 
 
 The "Strange Treatment of Original Sources" was published 
 September 3, 1902, in the Daily Oregonian, for many years 
 the leading paper of Oregon, its publication having been ar- 
 ranged for, not by me, but by a prominent citizen of the old 
 Oregon Territory, who desires to have its history correctly 
 written. 
 
 Mr. Harvey W. Scott (editor-in-chief of the Oregonian, and 
 first president of the Oregon Historical Society) is a native of 
 the old Oregon Territory, and not only ranks as one of the 
 most brilliant and successful of American newspaper editors, 
 but is beyond all question one of the very best, and probably 
 the best, informed man now living, about the whole history of 
 the old Oregon Territory. 
 
 On reading the manuscript of the "Strange Treatment," 
 without solicitation he wrote and put at the head of his edi- 
 torial page his opinion of it, in the editorial reprinted on page 
 7 infra. 
 
 Several of the topics in the "Strange Treatment" being also 
 treated in the review of Rev. M. Eells' "Reply," it seemed 
 best, when printing these two essays together, to somewhat 
 amplify those topics in the "Strange Treatment" as it was 
 
 510068 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 published in the Oregonian, so as to be able to cut out a good 
 deal of the matter in the review of M. Eells' "Reply" as it 
 was originally written, and still have it complete by references 
 to the appropriate pages in the "Strange Treatment." 
 
 The discussion of Professor Bourne's paper being a reprint 
 from the electrotype plates of the Transactions of the American 
 Historical Association for 1900, necessarily retains the paging 
 it had in that volume. 
 
 My forthcoming book will for the first time give the public 
 a full and connected history of the whole of the struggle for the 
 acquisition of Oregon, as it appears from a very careful'study 
 of the original sources, and will have full chapters on the fol- 
 lowing (and other) topics: 
 
 (a) The Governmental Action to Secure Oregon from 1803 
 to 1872, Being a Full Record of Diplomatic Negotiations with 
 France, Spain, England and Russia ; of Congressional Debates, 
 of Congressional Committee Reports and of the Explorations 
 and Reports Thereon of United States Naval and Military 
 Officers and Special Agents. 
 
 (b) The Truth About the Discovery of Routes Practicable 
 for and the Development of the First Transcontinental Wagon 
 Road, 1806 to 1846. 
 
 (c) The Truth About the Relation of the Hudson's Bay 
 Company to the American Exploration, Occupation and Settle- 
 ment of the Oregon Territory, as Stated in the Contemporane- 
 ous Letters, and Journals, and Reports to the Government, and 
 Books, and Magazine 'Articles, of Every American — fur trader, 
 scientist, missionary, private explorer or government officer or 
 leader of a party of emigrants — who left any such contem- 
 poraneous documents (as far as known) down to the Treaty of 
 1846. Much of this has never yet been published and much 
 more is difficult of access. 
 
 (d) The Long-Suppressed Evidence About the Origin and 
 Purpose of Whitman's Ride. 
 
 (e) All the letters Whitman ever wrote making claims that 
 the establishment of his mission and his ride had been of benefit 
 to the nation. Most of this has been heretofore suppressed. 
 
 (/) The Long-Suppressed Evidence as to the Rapid De- 
 cadence of the Whitman-Spalding-Eells-Walker Mission after 
 1839-40, and especially after 1843. 
 
 (g) The True Causes of the Whitman Massacre, with the 
 Conclusive Proof — some hitherto suppressed and the rest diffi- 
 cult of access — of the total falsity of the accusation that the 
 Hudson's Bay Company and the Catholics instigated or were 
 in any way responsible for that perfectly natural outburst of 
 Indian ferocity. 
 
 These chapters will contain all (and much more than all) 
 the evidence which submitted by me in manuscript, as stated 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 on pages 48-51 infra., has convinced every historian who 
 has had the privilege of reading it that the whole Whitman 
 Saved Oregon Story is a delusion, and the additional evi- 
 dence in these chapters, especially that which has been hereto- 
 fore suppressed, will prove quite as surprising as to the little 
 interest in the question of a wagon road to Oregon or the po- 
 litical destiny of Oregon displayed by Whitman and all his 
 associates from 1836 to 1843, an d as to the true relation of the 
 Hudson's Bay Company to die American exploration, occupa- 
 tion and settlement of Oregon, and as to the decadence of the 
 American Board Mission, and as to the true causes of the Whit- 
 man Massacre, as the evidence heretofore submitted proved to 
 be, as to the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride. 
 
 As to all the other books, and magazine and newspaper 
 articles advocating the Whitman Saved Oregon Story, they, 
 without exception, are as far from being trustworthy history 
 as are Dr. Mowry's "Marcus Whitman" and Rev. Dr. M. Eells' 
 "Reply," but to expose all their suppressions, and false assump- 
 tions, and misquotations, and misstatements would require a 
 thousand pages. 
 
 Barrows' "Oregon" and Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman 
 Saved Oregon" have had the widest circulation of any of 
 them, and neither book even alludes to the existence of any of 
 the correspondence of Whitman and his associates with the 
 American Board in 1840-41, which caused the Board to issue 
 its destructive order of February, 1842 (which neither of them 
 either quotes or alludes to), which order was the sole cause of 
 Whitman's ride. 
 
 The simplest test of the value of any historical writing is 
 to examine the honesty and accuracy of its quotations and its 
 summaries of documents too long to quote, and any writer who 
 does not quote accurately and summarize fairly and impartially 
 is wholly unworthy of credence. I have compared every quota- 
 tion in Barrows' "Oregon," and Nixon's "How Marcus Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon," with the book, government document, 
 magazine or newspaper in which it originally appeared, or is 
 alleged to have appeared (for some of the "quotations" are 
 pure fabrications, and never appeared as stated), and in neither 
 book is there so much as one honest quotation on any important 
 disputed point. 
 
 On some unimportant disputed, and some important undis- 
 puted points, there are fair quotations, but on all the important 
 disputed points the quotations range in unfairness all the way 
 from that device — as disreputable as it is ancient — of quoting 
 accurately up to a certain point, and stopping when the very 
 next succeeding paragraph of the context shows that the im- 
 pression sought to be created by the part quoted is directly 
 contrary to the facts; or quoting less than a hundred words 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 from an article covering nearly 8,000 words in an English 
 review, and stating that it was defamatory of Oregon and 
 printed to deceive Americans as to its value and so cause them 
 to abandon the whole of it to England, when not only the evi- 
 dent, but the explicitly avowed purpose of the writer was to 
 persuade England that it ought to yield to the American claim 
 as far North as 49 °, and make that the northern boundary of 
 Oregon; or quoting only fourteen words from a long article 
 not published in the London Examiner till July 24, 1847 — 
 more than four years after Whitman started back to Oregon — 
 and deliberately antedating it to 1843, an d so making it appear 
 to have been published prior to Whitman's arrival in the States, 
 and to have been designed to deceive us as to the value of 
 Oregon, when, as a matter of fact, the very first sentence in the 
 article (the whole of which is easily accessible, being quoted 
 (but without its date) in the "Introduction to the Works of 
 D. Webster," page CXLIX), plainly shows that it was written 
 some time after the treaty of 1846, fixing the boundary of 
 Oregon was made, and that its purpose was to congratulate the 
 English Government for its wisdom in yielding to the American 
 claim and fixing the boundary at 49 °, and so avoiding the ex- 
 penditure of life and treasure, which must have resulted from 
 going to war over a region whose value would not have justi- 
 fied such expenditure; or prefacing the quotation of a single 
 sentence from a long lecture by Captain William Sturgis, or of 
 two brief sentences from a long speech by Senator Thomas H. 
 Benton, by statements directly contrary to the sentiments of the 
 whole of the lecture and the speech; to absolute forgeries 
 (some of them attributed to Daniel Webster), so clumsily ex- 
 ecuted that their very language shows that they were never 
 uttered by Webster, since, whatever were his failings, he al- 
 ways discussed great public questions in sensible and dignified 
 English, and not in the style of a "sloppy" and sensational 
 newpaper writer. 
 
 Presumably, neither Barrows nor Nixon manufactured 
 these forgeries, but when they are so palpably fabricated, 
 surely it is but little less reprehensible for them by quoting 
 them to have endorsed them without any attempt at verifying 
 them, than to have themselves originated them, precisely as 
 there is little moral or legal distinction in the offense of manu- 
 facturing counterfeit money or in circulating it, when a mere 
 glance shows to any fairly intelligent person that it is counter- 
 feit, and when its acceptance by the unsuspecting is due to 
 their faith in the knowledge and integrity of the circulator. 
 Craighead's "Story of Marcus Whitman" (published by the 
 "Presbyterian Board of Missions and Sunday School Work," 
 and so put largely into S. S. libraries), is not only as worth- 
 less historically as these other books, but is even more ob- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 jectionable, as its main purpose is to revive the shameful 
 slander that the Catholics and the Hudson's Bay Co. instigated 
 the Whitman Massacre. 
 
 From the Daily Oregonian (of Portland, Oregon), Septem- 
 ber 3, 1902 : 
 
 "a scathing review/' 
 
 "It is well to call attention to the article published to-day on 
 The Whitman Myth,' by Principal William I. Marshall of 
 Chicago. This article is a dissection of the pretensions of 
 Dr. W. A. Mowry as an historian, as exhibited in his 'Marcus 
 Whitman and the Early Days of Oregon.' It explodes com- 
 pletely the theory on which the Whitman myth is built — the 
 theory, namely, that Oregon was about to be surrendered to 
 Great Britain ; that Whitman undertook his winter ride to pre- 
 vent that result; that his ride 'saved Oregon'; that he col- 
 lected and organized the migration of 1843, directed its march 
 and showed it a wagon route over the plains and mountains. 
 It shows how Dr. Mowry, following a preconceived idea and 
 purpose of hero-making, has colored the history by his assump- 
 tions and misrepresented it by his suppressions. In this article 
 there is close examination of the original sources of information 
 for ascertainment of the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride ; 
 there is a review of the condition of the Oregon question at 
 Washington, with positive proof that the assumption that the 
 Tyler administration was indifferent to Oregon was unfounded, 
 and consequently that Whitman could have exerted no influ- 
 ence to change the policy of the National Government towards 
 Oregon; and, finally, there is demonstration that Whitman's 
 relation towards the great migration of 1843 was slight and 
 practically unimportant. Great service is done to the truth 
 of history by this review. It is devotion to truth, not hostility 
 to the memory of Whitman, that prompts the effort to clear 
 this subject of its modern accretions of myth and fable. 
 
 "Whitman was but one of our pioneers. He was energetic 
 and adventurous, at times far beyond wisdom or prudence; 
 and to his blindness to real danger, which a wiser man would 
 have avoided, the destruction of himself and of his family was 
 due. He was apotheosized through his fate. Hero worship, 
 stimulated by religious or by ecclesiastical devotion, has created 
 his legend or myth, which in earlier and less critical times 
 would doubtless have passed unchallenged. But in our age 
 written and printed records are preserved, and the mythopeic 
 faculty of the human mind receives checks and corrections un- 
 known in the composition of the Homeric poems or portions of 
 the Biblical narratives. But the tendency to hero worship and 
 
8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 love of the marvelous will never be wholly eliminated from the 
 mind of man. Before the invention of writing and the use of 
 printing people forgot their actual history — so uninteresting 
 was it — and remembered only the fables they had built upon it. 
 "It is not the purpose of the Oregonian to repeat the state- 
 ments presented in this review, but only to refer the reader to 
 them and to bespeak for them careful examination. This re- 
 view by no means exhausts the subject. There are other 
 proofs, but Mr. Marshall, in this article, was dealing only with 
 the methods of Dr. Mowry, which he has subjected to a search- 
 ing and very complete exposure. Incidentally, a great deal of 
 matter has been presented by this reviewer, in a new form." 
 
STRANGE TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 A Review of "Marcus Whitman and the Early Days of 
 Oregon/' by Dr. W. A. Mowry. Silver, Burdett & Co., 1901. 
 
 (Copyright, 1902, by Principal William I. Marshall, Chicago.) 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 It was owing to Dr. Mowry's strong endorsement of the 
 first published (or Spalding-Gray) version of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon Story to me, in 1877, tnat I was imposed upon 
 by it from 1877 to 1882, and I have corresponded extensively 
 with him upon it, especially since I discovered, and (in lectures 
 in the great Peabody Institute course in Baltimore in Novem- 
 ber, 1884) demonstrated its total falsity; and he, as late as 
 December 9, 1898, wrote me a letter imploring me not to 
 publish the really vital evidence upon it, as follows : 
 
 "I have copied hundreds of typewritten pages from those 
 letters" (i. e., of Whitman and his associates to the American 
 Board) "during the last thirteen years. 
 
 "One thing, however, I have not felt at liberty to copy, and 
 do not think the Board should ever have permitted you or any 
 one else to copy. 
 
 "I refer to the confidential letters written by the missionaries 
 to the Secretary of the Board, relating to their private and per- 
 sonal affairs, and particularly complaints one of another. 
 
 "I do not think you ought to publish any extracts from the 
 letters of that character." 
 
 " .... In my own case, I always showed to the Sec- 
 retary the matter which I had copied, and I believe that this 
 has been the general practice. I certainly hope you will not 
 make public such private affairs, even though the courtesy was 
 extended to you to copy private letters." 
 
 I therefore awaited his "Marcus Whitman" with some curi- 
 osity to see whether he had written it on the lines of sup- 
 
io MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 pression and evasion and special pleading indicated by his 
 above quoted letter, or in accord with the universally accepted 
 canons of honest historical investigation and writing, by which 
 all real historians feel bound to work. 
 
 There are no letters in the correspondence of Whitman and 
 his associates with the American Board, which, since the en- 
 dorsement of the Whitman Saved Oregon Story, by the Mis- 
 sionary Herald, the official organ of that Board, in December, 
 1866, can with any propriety be considered as private or con- 
 fidential, the public having an undoubted right to know the con- 
 tents of all that correspondence in order that it may correctly 
 judge of the validity of the claims made about Marcus Whit- 
 man, and of the credence it should give to the "statements" 
 of Messrs. Spalding, Gray and C. Eells (from twenty-three to 
 forty years after the event), on which alone the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon Story rests. 
 
 No attempt was made by the Secretary of the American 
 Board to limit the freedom and thoroughness of my investi- 
 gations. 
 
 In his Preface, after informing us that he has been more 
 than twenty years investigating the Whitman Saved Oregon 
 subject, and that he has read "Everything I could lay my hands 
 upon," Dr. Mowry says : "This book is a history. It is not an 
 embellished story like Irving's Astoria or Parkman's Oregon 
 Trail. It was written with the single purpose of stating in a 
 clear and concise manner the important facts with which it 
 has to deal. From first to last it has to do with facts." 
 
 On page 1 14 he says : "It should be the aim of the impartial 
 historian to examine all sides of a disputed question, to sift all 
 statements, to examine all theories, to go, as far as possible, to 
 the original sources for his facts, and, free from bias or preju- 
 dice to state only that which appears to be thoroughly cor- 
 roborated as truth." 
 
 Let us compare his performance with this correct statement 
 of his duty. 
 
 He says (p. 1) : "At one time our government ignored the 
 country" (i. e.. Oregon) "as worthless, and was not unwilling 
 to sell it for a mess of pottage." (P. 2) : "Finally the savages 
 were permitted to butcher in cold blood the man who, by 
 bravery and patriotism utterly unprecedented, wrested that 
 entire country from the grasp of the Hudson's Bay Company, 
 and made it possible for the United States to hold it." (pp. 
 170-71, writing of the spring of 1843, an d of Webster's and 
 Tyler's ideas of Oregon) : "It was plainly apparent that Lord 
 Ashburton, Sir George Simpson and others, with British pro- 
 clivities, had thoroughly indoctrinated our statesmen with the 
 idea that the Rocky Mountains were impassable to wagons, 
 that Oregon could not be peopled from the States, and there- 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. n 
 
 fore its value to this country was small," and that "Webster 
 thought Oregon was useless to our country on account of the 
 impassable character of the mountains," and that "Tyler en- 
 tertained precisely the same views" (as Webster) "as to the 
 uselessness of Oregon to the United States." (pp. 191-2, 
 speaking of those desiring to migrate to Oregon in 1843) : 
 "It is evident from a variety of sources of information that 
 the great drawback to these would-be emigrants was that 
 they could not carry their wagons and families through the 
 mountains. The great Roc'<y Mountain range and the Blue 
 Mountains were supposed to be impassable for wagons." 
 
 ONLY THREE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS CONCERNING WHITMAN. 
 
 As to Dr. Whitman there are but three really important 
 questions, to wit: 
 
 (A) What was the origin and the purpose of Whitman's 
 ride from Oregon to the States, begun October 3, 1842? 
 
 (B) What was the condition of the Qpegep—cuiestion at 
 Washington (i. e., the attitude towards i^ of Tyer ^ Adminis- 
 tration), in the winter of 1842-43 and the^spring of 1843, an d 
 what influence, if any, did Whitman exert to change the policy 
 of the National Government towards Oregon. 
 
 (C) What was Whitman's real relation to the great over- 
 land migration 01*1843? 
 
 Let us examine Dr. Mowry's treatment of the original 
 sources concerning each of these three points. 
 
 ORIGINAL SOURCES AS TO " A." 
 
 As to (A) the only important original sources and the only 
 ones that it is certain Dr. Mo wry has examined are : 
 
 First. The correspondence of the Oregon Mission in the 
 archives of the A. B. C. F. M. in Boston, prior to Whitman's 
 return to Oregon in September, 1843, before which none of 
 his associates knew that anything had occurred to make them 
 wish their records different from what they had been written. 
 
 These letters, many of them very long (one covering 74 and 
 another 52 pages of very large paper), number more than 200 
 and must aggregate considerably more than 400,000 words, 
 and in them all is not one sentence expressing the least in- 
 terest in or concern about the political destinies of any part 
 of the Oregon Territory, or furnishing the least support in any 
 other way to any form of the saving Oregon theory of Whit- 
 man's ride, and the same is true of all the correspondence of 
 all these missionaries with their friends (so far as it has yet 
 been published), during the whole time the Oregon question 
 was unsettled, except that after Whitman had visited the 
 States and found the whole country aflame about the Oregon 
 
12 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 question he did, in some of his letters after his return, express 
 some interest in the subject, and made some very extravagant 
 and unfounded claims of having been largely instrumental in 
 settling the question by having led out the 1843 migration./- 
 
 The nearest to an expression of any interest in the political 
 destiny of Oregon prior to Whitman's Ride is the following 
 passage in an undated and hitherto unpublished letter of W. H. 
 Gray (No. 136, Vol. 138, American Board archives), plainly 
 written after October, 1839, and probably in November or 
 December, 1839 : "Dr. McLoughlin said to me that it was his 
 wish that our people should occupy that place, and gave as a 
 reason that then our people would be all together, and have 
 nobody to meddle with us, and in case the boundary line was 
 to be the Columbia River and the Fort" (i. e., Walla Walla) 
 "was to be removed, he should like to have us there, both on 
 account of the influence we might exert on the Indians and 
 the men of the Fort. He did not wish to answer all my ques- 
 tions about the country, because it would imply a claim to 
 the country, which they had none, except what their forts now 
 occupied; he would say that he thought we had just as good a 
 right to occupy any place as they had." 
 
 Any proper treatment of Whitman's career requires an 
 honest summary (to the extent of 20 to 25 pages like this), of 
 some 75,000 to 90,000 words of this correspondence, and in ad- 
 dition an accurate quotation of some 8,000 to 10,000 words 
 more of it. 
 
 Of all this correspondence Dr. Mowry quotes only 510 
 words, and they — even as he quotes them — furnish no support 
 to his theories about the political purpose of Whitman's ride. 
 
 All but 86 of these 510 words Professor Bourne had prev- 
 iously quoted in the "Legend of Marcus Whitman" as being the 
 strongest possible evidence against the saving Oregon theory 
 of Whitman's ride, and they have been considered as being 
 conclusive against the theory of any saving Oregon purpose 
 of that ride and as proving it to have been undertaken solely 
 on the business of his mission, by such historians as Professor 
 John Fiske, Dr. Edward Eggleston, Professor John B. Mc- 
 Master, Professor Allen C. Thomas, Professor Harry P. Jud- 
 son, Professor Edward C. McLaughlin, Horace E. Scudder, 
 Principal Wilbur F. Gordy, Professor Edward Channing, Pro- 
 fessor F. Newton Thorpe, etc., etc. (Cf. Am. Hist. Review, 
 January, 1901 (pp. 276-300) and Tr. Am. Hist. Assn.; 1900, 
 pp. 288-300). 
 
 But, whereas, Professor Bourne quoted accurately, Dr. 
 Mowry quotes far otherwise. 
 
 The only document Whitman took with him to the American 
 Board from the three men who remained associated with him 
 in the Mission was the following: 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 13 
 
 "Resolved, That if arrangements can be made to continue 
 the operations of this station, that Dr. Marcus Whitman be at 
 liberty and advised to visit the United States as soon as prac- 
 ticable, t6 confer with the Committee of the A. B. C. F. M. 
 in regard to* the interests of this Mission. 
 
 (Signed) "E. Walker, Moderator. 
 
 "Cushing Eells, Scribe. 
 "Wailatpu, Sept. 28, 1842." " H - H - Spalding," 
 
 This Dr. Mowry prints (on pp. 174-5), but omits the last 
 eight words, "in regard to the interests of this mission," being 
 the adverbial phrase which distinctly limited to the business of 
 the^. mission the purpose for which all of his associates sanc- 
 tioned his journey. 
 
 That this was an intentional omission is evident from the 
 fact that in an article glorifying Whitman, in the Boston Con- 
 gregationalism November 18, 1897, Dr. Mowry omitted from 
 his quotation of this document all after the word "practicable," 
 putting a period there, where the document had a comma ; and 
 when he was criticised by me for making so deceptive a quo- 
 tation, he defended it as justifiable, saying, "One sentence was 
 all I needed, and I used that one," whereas there is but one 
 complex sentence in the whole document, and the criticism 
 was because he had not "used that one," but had omitted the 
 two adverbial phrases which stated precisely why Whitman 
 was authorized to make his ride. 
 
 Further, Dr. Mowry (p. 129) prefaces the 420 words he 
 has quoted from Rev. E. Walker's letter of October 3, 1842, 
 with the statement that "Father Eells . . . wrote a let- 
 ter from which the following is quoted," and prints at the 
 end of the extract, 
 
 "(Signed) 'Cushing Eells/ " 
 
 Yet Dr. Mowry well knows (having mentioned this identi- 
 cal letter as one of Walker's in 1899, m a letter to the writer 
 of this criticism), that this letter, which he thus ascribes to 
 Cushing Eells, is indexed in the archives of the American 
 Board as a letter from Rev. Elkanah Walker, and that of the 
 16 pages of this letter, 15, including every one of the 420 words 
 he has quoted from it, are in the handwriting of Elkanah 
 Walker, and that it is signed Elkanah Walker, and not Cushing 
 Eells, and that every word in it which is in C. Eells' hand- 
 writing is the following endorsement of its correctness, on its 
 fourteenth page, which, by mistake, Walker had left blank. 
 
 "Through mistake this page was omitted. I am happy to 
 say the subjects of this letter have been frequently discussed 
 of late by Mr. Walker and myself. I do not now recollect 
 that there has been any important difference in the conclusions 
 
14 MOWRY'S TREATMENT Of ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 arrived at, and I do most cheerfully add that considering the 
 short time allowed for writing- the letter I think it well done 
 and consider the statements very just. 
 
 "The general plan of the letter was mutually agreed upon, 
 and after hearing the whole of it read once and parts of it more 
 than once, I have observed nothing of importance to which I 
 cannot give a full assent." 
 
 (Signed) "Cushing Eells." 
 
 To this endorsement by C. Eells, Dr. Mowry never alludes, 
 though knowing all about it as his correspondence with me 
 shows. 
 
 Rev. E. Walker's diary (in MS., in possession of the Oregon 
 Historical Society) reads "Monday, Oct. 3, 1842. Commenced 
 my letter to Mr. Greene. Succeeded better than I expected. 
 Tuesday, 4. Continued to write and make slow progress. 
 Wednesday, 5. Busy at writing, but feel as though I could 
 not make out a good one . . . Thursday, 6. Still at my 
 letter . . . Saturday, 8. Finished copying my letter to 
 Mr. Greene and read it to Mr. Eells, who approved it." 
 
 So "the short time allowed for writing the letter" was six 
 days. 
 
 Not another word besides these 510 is there in Dr. Mowry's 
 book, written by Rev. C. Eells, Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. E. 
 Walker, or Mr. W. H. Gray, to the Secretary of the Ameri- 
 can Board while the mission continued, nor subsequently 
 down to May 28, 1866 (when Rev. C. Eells first endorsed 
 the Whitman Saved Oregon story, in a letter which the Mis- 
 sionary Herald published in December, 1866), except that in 
 his Appendix, Dr. Mowry prints two letters from Rev. C. 
 Eells, and two from Rev. H. H. Spalding, written in Decem- 
 ber, 1847, and January, 1848, and relating to nothing but the 
 dreadful massacre of November 29-December 8, 1847, m which 
 Dr. and Mrs. Whitman and twelve others perished, and which 
 destroyed the mission, and to the rescue of the survivors by the 
 Hudson's Bay Company's efforts; and this though there are 
 in the American Board archives letters written by them to the 
 American Board, between Whitman's return to Oregon, in 
 September, 1843, an ^ May, 1866, amounting to about 250,000 
 words. 
 
 Though thus chary of quoting what C. Eells, H. H. Spalding 
 and W. H. Gray wrote prior to the publication of the Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon story, in 1864-5-6, Dr. Mowry quotes from 
 their letters, "statements" and other publications subsequent 
 to September, 1865, to the following amounts : 
 
 From Rev. H. H. Spalding 2,192 words 
 
 From Rev. C. Eells 1,453 words 
 
 From Mr. W. H. Gray .3,440 words 
 
 Total 7,085 words 
 
HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 15 
 
 But neither he nor any other advocate of the Saving Oregon 
 theory of Whitman's ride has ever been able to produce one 
 word written by Rev. E. Walker in support of it, though he 
 lived in Oregon till his death in 1877, and knew exactly as much 
 about the origin and purpose of that ride as any of his asso- 
 ciates. 
 
 Great as is this amount, it is but a faint index of the extent 
 to which Dr. Mowry uses the statements of Spalding,^Gray and 
 C. Eells made subsequent to 1864-5, f° r practically^all of his 
 book that relates to Whitman is a mere condensation of, or a 
 paraphrase of those statements, or of the statements of others 
 whose ideas about the matter are plainly derived from Spald- 
 ing, Gray and C. Eells. 
 
 An example of how very peculiar are Dr. Mowry's ideas 
 as to the proper use of "original sources," is found in his 
 Chapter X, "The Missionaries Discuss the Situation," of which 
 he devotes 3 pages to C. Eells' "recollections" (in 1866, and 
 subsequent years down to 1882), which "recollections" (from 
 24 to 40 years after the event) Mr. Eells did not pretend to' 
 support by reference to any contemporaneous letters, journals 
 or other written or printed documents, as to the patriotic 
 origin of Whitman's ride, and of the details of the Special 
 Meeting of the Mission held at Whitman's Station, Sept. 26-27, 
 1842, which authorized his ride. 
 
 But neither in Chapter X, nor elsewhere in the book, does 
 he even allude to the 14-page letter (received by D. Greene, 
 Sec, on May 3, 1843), dated Oct. 3, 1842, in Gushing Eells' 
 handwriting and signed by him (and indexed by the American 
 Board among C. Eells' letters), which has a brief note of en- 
 dorsement of its correctness in E. Walker's handwriting, and ■ 
 signed by him, which letter contains the official report of that \ 
 Special Meeting of Sept. 26-27, ^42, signed by E. Walker, 
 Moderator, and Cushing Eells, Scribe, which record, written 
 but six days after the close of the meeting, gives only the busi- 
 ness of the mission as engaging its attention, without the least 
 intimation that any political or patriotic ideas were even men- 
 tioned during its whole session. 
 
 Yet knowing well that this record still exists in the archives 
 of the American Board, Dr. Mowry copies without comment 
 (on p. 129) Rev. C. Eells' statement made in 1882, that the 
 record of that Special Meeting was destroyed at the time of 
 the Whitman massacre ! 
 
 DR. MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF MRS. WHITMAN'S LETTERS. 
 
 The second such "original source" as to "A" is the cor- 
 respondence of Mrs. Whitman with her parents, brothers and 
 sisters after March, 1840, when Gray began to bring the quar- 
 
16 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 rels of the various members of the mission, (and especially of 
 the Whitmans and Spalding, and himself,) to the attention 
 of the American Board, and prior to her husband's return in 
 September, 1843. 
 
 Of this there will be found about 42,000 words in the Trans. 
 Ore. Pioneer Association, 1891 and 1893, and to fairly present 
 the relation of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Spalding- 
 Whitman mission at least 20,000 more words of earlier and 
 later dates should be carefully studied and summarized to the 
 extent of fully 1,000 words, while fully 1,000 words more 
 should be quoted from these 20,000. Of the 42,000 above men- 
 tioned fully 2,000 should be quoted. 
 
 Of these 42,000 words, Dr. Mowry only quotes the following 
 42 words (p. 122) in a letter to her husband, dated Oct. 22, 
 1842: "Indeed, much as I shall and do want to see you, I 
 prefer that you stay just as long as it is necessary to accomplish 
 all your heart's desire respecting the interest of this country, 
 so dear to us both, our home." 
 
 This brief extract Dr. Mowry declares "Showed what she 
 understood to be the object of his journey ," 
 
 But how this shows "What his heart's desire was," he fails 
 to explain. He nowhere informs his readers where they can 
 find this letter (which is in Trans. Ore. Pioneer Assn., 1891, 
 p. 167). 
 
 Between September 29, 1842, and May 18, 1843, Mrs. 
 Whitman wrote five letters, as follows, to her relatives and 
 her husband, in the first two of which she explicitly stated that 
 his journey was on missionary business, and in the other three 
 stated what amounted to the same thing. 
 
 Sept. 29, 1842 (the next day after her husband first pro- 
 posed the journey), she wrote as follows to her brother, at 
 Quincy, 111. : 
 
 "My beloved husband has about concluded to start next 
 Monday to go to the United States. ... If you are still 
 in Quincy you may not see him until his return, as his busi- 
 ness requires great haste. He wishes to reach Boston as early 
 as possible so as to make arrangements to return next summer 
 if prospered. The interests of the missionary cause in this 
 country calls him home." Sept. 30, 1842, she wrote to "My 
 Beloved Parents, Brothers and Sisters: You will be surprised 
 if this letter reaches you to learn that the bearer is my dear 
 husband, and that you will after a few days have the pleasure 
 of seeing him. May you have a joyful meeting. He goes 
 upon important business as connected with the missionary 
 cause, the cause of Christ in this land, which I will leave for 
 him to explain when you see him, because I have not time 
 to enlarge. He has but yesterday fully made up his mind 
 to go, and he wishes to start Monday, and this is Friday. 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 17 
 
 . . . He has for a companion Mr. Love joy, a respectable, 
 intelligent man and a lawyer, but not a Christian, who ex- 
 pects to accompany him all the way to Boston, as his friends 
 are in that region, and perhaps to Washington. . . . He 
 goes with the advice and entire confidence of his brethren in 
 the mission, and who value him not only as an associate, but 
 as their physician, and feel as much as I do, that they know 
 not how to spare him ; but the interest of the cause demands 
 the sacrifice on our part; and could you know all the circum- 
 stances in the case you would see more clearly how much our 
 hearts are identified in the salvation of the Indians and the 
 interests of the cause generally in this country." (Trans. Ore. 
 Pioneer Assn., 1893, p. 165-9.) 
 
 March 11, 1843, she wrote to her sister Harriet, and descant- 
 ing on the pain of being "so widely and for so long a time" 
 separated from her husband, continued, "For what would you 
 be willing to make such a sacrifice? Is there anything in this 
 lower world that would tempt you to it? I presume not; at 
 least I can see no earthly inducement sufficiently paramount 
 to cause me voluntarily to take upon myself such a painful 
 trial. Painful, I say ? Yes, painful in the extreme to the nat- 
 ural heart. But there is one object, our blessed Saviour, for 
 whose sake I trust both you as well as we are willing, if called 
 to it, to suffer all things. It was for Him, for the advance- 
 ment of His cause, that I could say to my beloved husband, 
 'Go; take all the time necessary to accomplish His work; and 
 the Lord go with and bless you.'" (Idem., 155.) 
 
 April 14, 1843, sne wrote to her brother Jonas as follows: 
 "Husband's presence is needed very much at this juncture. 
 A great loss is sustained by his going to the States. I 
 mean a present loss to the station and Indians, but hope 
 and expect a greater good will be accomplished by it. 
 There was no other way for us to do. W felt that we 
 could not remain as we was without more help, and 
 we are so far off that to send by letter and get returns 
 was too slow a way for the present emergency/' (Idem, 
 p. 161.) May 18, 1843, sne wrote to her husband a letter 
 which followed him to Boston, and reaching there Sept. 6, 
 1843, when he was six days' journey west of Ft. Hall on his 
 return trip, this letter (which was directed on the outside to 
 Dr. Whitman or Rev. David Greene) was retained there, and 
 is No. 106, of Vol. 138 of the Correspondence of the Amer- 
 ican Board. In it she wrote "wishing you, my dear husband, 
 as speedy a return to the bosom of your family as the busi- 
 ness of the Lord upon which you have gone will admit of." 
 So far as known these five letters are the only ones which Mrs. 
 Whitman ever wrote which stated anything about the origin 
 
18 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 and purpose of his ride (and I have quoted all they contain 
 on those points). 
 
 Though knowing about all these letters, Dr. Mowry does not 
 even allude to any one of them. 
 
 DR. MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF THE FIRST TWO ACCOUNTS OF THE 
 ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF WHITMAN^ RIDE EVER PRINTED. 
 
 The only remaining "original sources" or contemporaneous 
 accounts of the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride are the 
 two official accounts in the Missionary Herald — the monthly 
 organ of the American Board — the first in the number for 
 September, 1843, an d the second in the number for July, 1848. 
 Neither Dr. Mowry nor any other advocate of the Saving Ore- 
 gon theory of that ride has ever dared to quote either of these 
 accounts, and I do not believe any advocate of that theory ever 
 will give his readers a chance to read them. No advocate of 
 the Saving Oregon story ever intimated that any such accounts 
 had ever been published till after Mrs. Victor and Elwood 
 Evans in their investigations found and published them, and 
 since them nearly all advocates of the Saving Oregon story, 
 like Barrows, Craighead, Coffin, Nixon, Mowry, Mrs. Eva 
 Emery Dye, Parker, and Penrose have avoided even alluding 
 to these two official accounts of the origin and purpose of that 
 ride. If based only on the correspondence of the mission with 
 the American Board, these (which are not only the first two, 
 but also the only articles ever printed that gave any account 
 of the origin and purpose of that ride till the Saving Oregon 
 theory was published in 1864-5-6) could not be considered 
 as "original sources," since that correspondence is still in ex- 
 istence (though all its vital parts have always been carefully 
 suppressed by all the advocates of the Saving Oregon story), 
 but as these two accounts might have been based to some ex- 
 tent on what Whitman himself said, when in Boston, March 
 30- April 8, 1843, tne y are fairly entitled to rank as "original 
 sources." 
 
 The first account is as follows: "It was stated in the last 
 Annual Report that the Southern Branch of this Mission, 
 embracing the stations at Wailatpu, near Walla Walla, and 
 Clear Water and Kamiah, higher up on the waters of 
 Snake River, had been discontinued, but at a special meeting 
 of the mission, held last October, to consider this decision, it 
 was thought advisable that Dr. Whitman should personally 
 communicate the condition and prospects of these stations to 
 the Prudential Committee. After a long and toilsome journey 
 he reached Boston, early in the spring; and, upon hearing the 
 representations which he made, it was resolved to sustain the 
 operations of the mission without any material change. An- 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 19 
 
 other object of Dr. Whitman in making the above mentioned 
 journey was to procure additional laborers. He desired also 
 to induce Christian families to emigrate and settle in the vicin- 
 ity of the different stations, that they might relieve the mis- 
 sionary of his secular responsibilities, and also contribute 
 directly in various ways to the social and moral improvement 
 of the Indians. How far his wishes in those particulars will 
 be responded to is uncertain/' (Miss. Herald, September, 
 1843, P- 35^- ) This did not appear till after the receipt by D. 
 Greene, Secretary, of Rev. C. Eells' letter of Oct. 3, 1842, 
 endorsed by Rev. E. Walker, which contained the official re- 
 port of that Special Meeting, and of Walker's letter of Oct. 
 3, 1842, endorsed by C. Eells as correct, and also of Walker's 
 letter of Feb. 28, 1843, complaining that Whitman started 
 to the States without waiting for their letters, as he had agreed 
 to do, and also H. H. Spalding's long letter of defense and 
 justification of Oct. 15, 1842, as the endorsement of D. Greene, 
 secretary, on these several letters shows. This first published 
 account of the origin and purpose of the ride agrees exactly 
 with the account given in the letters for which Whitman did 
 not wait, and is absolutely irreconcilable with the account Rev. 
 C. Eells gave in his various "statements" in 1866, 1878 and 
 1883. Turning to p. 193 of the Annual Report of the American 
 Board for 1842 we find that not only were these three out of 
 the four stations discontinued, but that both Rev. H. H. Spald- 
 ing and Mr. W. H. Gray were recalled to the States by the 
 order of February, 1842. Yet Gray, in 1885, wrote that he 
 had no personal knowledge of that order, or of its being talked 
 about at the Special Meeting of Sept. 26-27, 1842. (Cf. Gray's 
 article in the Oregonian of Feb. 1, 1885, reprinted in "The 
 Whitman Controversy" (pamphlet), Portland, Ore., 1885). 
 
 The second account is in the Missionary Herald for July, 
 1848, in the brief sketch of his life (containing only 162 
 words), prefacing the account of the massacre, and merely 
 says, "He made a visit to the Atlantic States in the Spring of 
 1843, being called hither by the business of the mission." 
 
 Not another word about Whitman's ride was printed in this 
 official organ of the American Board till in December, 1866, 
 18 years and five months later, it published and endorsed Rev. 
 C. Eells' version of its origin and purpose. 
 
 This second account was published two years after the treaty 
 of 1846 had settled the boundary of Oregon at 49 degrees, 
 and the editors of the Missionary Herald knew that in chronicl- 
 ing the massacre they were also chronicling the final destruction 
 of their Oregon Mission. Who can doubt that with the mem- 
 ory of Whitman's visit only five years before fresh in their 
 minds, and with all the correspondence of the mission and the 
 records of the action of the Board thereon open to their inspec- 
 
20 HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 tion, they knew, and in this short sentence stated exactly what 
 caused his ride, and who can doubt that if they could honestly 
 have claimed that that ride had any political significance, or 
 had saved any, even the smallest part of Oregon to the nation, 
 they would then have stated it, when the whole country was 
 stirred with sympathetic sorrow over the bloody tragedy which 
 had destroyed their Oregon Mission? This second account 
 of the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride, containing only 
 22 words, neither Dr. Mowry nor any other advocate of the 
 Saving Oregon theory of that ride has ever quoted, and I 
 think no one of them has ever even intimated that any such 
 account was ever printed. 
 
 DR. MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF WHITMAN^ CORRESPONDENCE 
 AFTER HIS RETURN TO OREGON. 
 
 Whitman's letters after his return to Oregon cannot be con- 
 sidered as "original sources" as to the origin and purpose 
 of that ride, since his frigid reception by the Secretary of the 
 American Board (who told him he was sorry that he had 
 come), and the fact that the next month after he started on 
 that journey the Indians burned his rude grist mill and a large 
 quantity of grain, involving him in so much expense to re- 
 build, that, with the expenses of his journey, he was troubled 
 for two years after his return in his settlements with the 
 American Board, as he states in his letter of April 13, 1846, 
 (which Dr. Mowry refrains from even alluding to), together 
 with the fact that the decadence of the mission which had be- 
 gun as early as 1839, continued to progress towards its com- 
 plete destruction so steadily and with such frightful rapidity 
 that on May 20, 1845, l ess tnan 2° months after his return, 
 Whitman himself, having been directed at a full meeting of the 
 Mission (at which all were present except Mr. Spalding), held 
 at Whitman's Station, and which closed May 14, 1845, to write 
 to D. Greene, Sec, as to the state of the mission, etc., was 
 compelled to write : "The state of the mission is such as to give 
 no very decided promise of permanency or of much good." All 
 these things subjected Whitman to very strong temptation to 
 exaggerate the importance of his ride, and its influence on the 
 destiny of Oregon, so that he naturally strove to convince the 
 Secretary of the Board that though the mission (whose con- 
 tinuance had been secured only by that ride), seemed destined 
 soon to be a dismal failure, yet his expensive disobedience to 
 the positive order of the Board in making that ride had, some- 
 how, resulted in such benefit to Oregon as justified the expense 
 of the ride and the resulting continuance of the mission. 
 
 An indispensable postulate of the Whitman Saved Oregon 
 story being that the mission was of immense benefit to the 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 21 
 
 natives, and continued in a flourishing condition until it was 
 destroyed by the Whitman massacre of November, 1847, which 
 massacre all the advocates of the Whitman Legend represent 
 as falling on a flourishing and successful mission, while Spald- 
 ing and Gray (two of the chief witnesses on whom Dr. Mowry 
 and all other advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story 
 rely) declared that it was instigated by the Hudson Bay Com- 
 pany, and the Catholics, (which charge was as atrocious and 
 as inexcusable a slander as ever was uttered,) neither Dr. 
 Mowry nor any other advocate of the Whitman Saved Oregon 
 story has ever quoted one sentence of any of the scores of 
 pages of the contemporaneous correspondence and diaries of 
 the mission, which establish beyond dispute that it was in a 
 state of decadence really as early as 1839-40, and steadily and 
 rapidly went down from that time onward, so that if there 
 had been no Whitman massacre the mission in all probability 
 would soon have been abandoned, as the Methodist Mission 
 to the Oregon Indians had already been. 
 
 Want of space prevents further discussion of these points 
 here, but in my forthcoming book I devote a chapter to "The 
 Long Suppressed Evidence on the Decadence of the Whitman- 
 Spalding-Eells-Walker Mission," and another to "The Long 
 Suppressed Evidence on the True Causes of the ^Whitman 
 Massacre," and the readers of them will find them quite as 
 startling as the chapter on "The Long Suppressed Evidence as 
 to the Origin and Purpose of Whitman's ride." 
 
 Sixteen of Whitman's letters between Nov. 1, 1843, and 
 Oct. 18, 1847, ag-greg-ating- about 26,000 to 28,000 words, are 
 in the archives of the American Board. 
 
 Although in several of these letters Whitman made very 
 extravagant and wholly unwarranted claims of great services 
 rendered to the National Government, it is a very significant 
 fact that in none of them, nor in any of his letters to his friends, 
 nor in any of Mrs. Whitman's to her friends, is there any 
 claim that he ever had had any interview with President Tyler, 
 or Secretary Webster, or that he had ever received any prom- 
 ise of any assistance from them, or from any officer of the Na- 
 tional Government, or that he had communicated any informa- 
 tion of any importance to the Government, or had published in 
 newspapers or otherwise any such information, or held any 
 meetings to promote migration to Oregon, or that he had had 
 anything to do with originating or organizing the migration of 
 1843, Dut on l y > at fi rst > in November, 1843, tnat n€ was "instru- 
 mental in leading the 1843 migration," and later that he "led" 
 that migration, and though he claims, (what is manifestly incor- 
 rect,) that the migration of 1843 was a decisive factor in 
 bringing about the treaty of 1846, he nowhere, save in his letter 
 of April t, 1847, — f° nr an d one-half years after he started on 
 
22 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 his ride, — claims that his ride had any other purpose than 
 missionary business. 
 
 Dr. Mowry's treatment of this letter illustrates his ideas of 
 going to "original sources wherever practicable." 
 
 On pp. 198-9 he says: "In another letter" (whose date 
 he does not give), "to Mr. Greene, is the following: 'It was 
 to open a practical (practicable) route and safe passage, and 
 secure a favorable report of the journey from emigrants, 
 which, in. connection with other objects caused me to leave 
 my family and brave the toils and dangers of the journey, 
 notwithstanding the unusual severity of the winter, and the 
 great depth of snow.' 
 
 "Then he mentions the 'saving the mission from being broken 
 up, as 'another' object of his journey." 
 
 But instead of going to the "original source" for this in- 
 accurate and deceptive quotation, Dr. Mowry has copied it 
 verbatim (and without credit), from an article defending the 
 Whitman Saved Oregon story (by Rev. Dr. Laurie, the official 
 historian of the American Board), in the Missionary Herald, 
 for September, 1885, p. 350. 
 
 Going to the "original source," to wit. : Whitman's own 
 letter (covering 7 pages large sized letter paper), in the 
 archives of the American Board, we find the following, viz. : 
 
 "It was to open a practical route and safe passage and to 
 secure a favorable report of the journey from immigrants, 
 which, in connection with other objects, caused me to leave 
 my family and brave the toils and dangers of the journey, 
 which carried me on, notwithstanding I was forced out of my 
 direct track, and notwithstanding the unusual severity of the 
 winter and great depth of snow. 
 
 "In connection with this let me say, the other great object 
 for which I went was to save the mission from being broken 
 up just then, which it must have been, as you will see by a 
 reference to the doings of the Committee" (i. e., the Prudential 
 Committee of the American Board), "which confirmed the re- 
 call of Mr. Spalding only two weeks before my arrival in 
 Boston. I often reflect upon the fact that you told me you 
 were sorry I came. ... It may not be inappropriate to 
 observe that at that moment the Methodist Mission, as well 
 as our own, was on the point of dissolution." 
 
 Every other advocate of the Whitman Legend who has 
 quoted from this letter has refrained, as carefully as Dr. Mowry 
 has, from making a fair quotation from it, so that this is the 
 first chance the public has ever had to read exactly what Whit- 
 man wrote three and one-half years after his return to Oregon, 
 and all that has been found that he ever wrote, making any 
 claim that anything other than the business of saving the mis- 
 sion from destruction impelled him to make his ride. 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 23 
 
 If the reader will now turn to Whitman's letters of May 
 12, 27, 28 and 30, 1843 (PP- 37-8 infra.), he will discover ex- 
 actly how much (or rather how very little) was Whitman's 
 interest in leading a migration to Oregon at the very time when 
 it was gathering and starting. 
 
 Presumably (though he has not accurately quoted this let- 
 ter) Dr. Mowry knows its contents, and presumably also he 
 knows perfectly well the contents of Mrs. Whitman's letter 
 of April 14, 1843 (quoted on p. 17 ante, but), to which he does 
 not allude. Yet, notwithstanding Whitman in this one explicit- 
 ly declares that the mission would have been broken up "just 
 then" if he had not made the ride, and Mrs. Whitman wrote, 
 "There was no other way for us to do, we felt that we could 
 not remain, as we was without more help, and we were so far 
 off that to send by letter was too slow a way for the present 
 emergency." Dr. Mowry (carefully suppressing this strictly 
 contemporaneous evidence of the two people who knew best 
 about the urgency of the mission business in causing Whitman 
 to make his winter's ride) says (p. 131), "But if this" (i. e., 
 the business of the mission) "was the only motive for that 
 hazardous journey, why should he not have waited until 
 spring? It seems quite clear that a summer trip across the 
 continent would have accomplished that end just as well," and 
 (p. 188), "Had his purpose been confined solely to the affairs 
 of the mission he could have waited until spring, and made 
 the journey during the summer months/' 
 
 Three indispensable postulates of Dr. Mowry's claim that 
 Whitman "wrested that entire country" (i. e., the old Oregon 
 Territory) "from the Hudson's Bay Company" are: 
 
 First. That as late as March, 1843, tnat "entire country" 
 i. e., the present states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, to- 
 gether with about 28,000 square miles of Northwestern Mon- 
 tana and about 13,000 square miles of Northwestern Wyom- 
 ing, in all about 292,000 square miles, or nearly one-twelfth 
 of all our territory on this continent, was in controversy be- 
 tween the United States and Great Britain. 
 
 Yet knowing perfectly well that in 1824 and again in 1827 
 England offered us the line of 49 degrees to the most north- 
 eastern branch of the Columbia, and thence the river to the 
 Pacific, which left really in dispute not "that entire country," 
 but only about 55,000 to 58,000 square miles, or less than 
 one-fifth of "that entire country," being only that part of 
 Washington north and west of the Columbia, and that we 
 both times immediately refused this offer and insisted on 49 
 degrees to the Coast, Dr. Mowry deems it consistent with his 
 duty as an "impartial historian" to suppress all mention of 
 
24 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 these offers of England, and of the fact that in 1825 the Hud- 
 son's Bay Company "officially notified" Dr. McLoughlin, their 
 superintendent in charge of the Oregon region from 1824 to 
 1845, tna t "in no event could the British claim extend south 
 of the Columbia/' and also to suppress all mention of the fact 
 that Lord Ashburton came over in April, 1842, "specifically 
 authorized," as we shall see later, to renew to us the offer made 
 us in the negotiations of 1824 and 1827, and also to suppress 
 all mention of the fact that in 1826, when not only all the 
 region north of Missouri and west of the Mississippi River, 
 but also everything else north and west of Illinois and Mich- 
 igan was not even organized as a territory, but was an un- 
 broken wilderness, we notified England that "49 degrees was 
 our ultimatum for the northern boundary of Oregon." 
 
 Second. That England could by making settlements and 
 establishing trading posts subsequent to Oct. 20, 1818 (the 
 date of the first of our treaties of "joint policy" relating to 
 Oregon), strengthen her claim to it while the treaty of 1818 
 and its renewal in 1827 remained in force. 
 
 In support of his repeated assertions that England could 
 do this and that the Hudson's Bay Company were actively 
 engaged in doing it, Dr. Mowry quotes, not the Presidents, 
 Secretaries of State and Ministers to England who negotiated 
 for us on the Oregon boundary, all of whom held that Eng- 
 land could not do this, but his favorite "original authorities" 
 on the history and diplomacy of Oregon — Rev. H. H. Spalding, 
 Rev. C. Eells and Mr. W. H. Gray. 
 
 But the very terms of those treaties made such strengthen- 
 ing of her claims impossible, a position not only always held 
 by every one of our diplomatists and Presidents who negotiated 
 on the Oregon question — James Monroe, John Q. Adams, 
 Albert Gallatin, Andrew Jackson, Edward Livingston, Martin 
 Van Buren, John Tyler, Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, 
 John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, James K. Polk and George 
 Bancroft — and also by many others of our most eminent 
 statesmen, but also tacitly admitted by all the British diplo- 
 matists who negotiated on it, no one of whom ever ventured 
 to assert that such settlements and trading posts had made 
 the British claim one whit stronger than it was Oct. 20, 1818, 
 and also explicitly assented to by Lord Aberdeen (head of the 
 British Foreign Office from 1841 to 1846), in two interviews 
 with Edward Everitt in November and December, 1843. 
 (Cf. on this the authorities cited in Trans. Am. Hist. Assn. for 
 1900, p. 223 infra, and Berlin Arbitration, p. 126.) 
 
 Third. That as late as March, 1843, the Government and 
 the people of the country thought Oregon worthless because 
 the Rocky and Blue Mountains were supposed to be impassa- 
 ble for wagons. To support this Dr. Mowry offers not a sen- 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 25 
 
 tcnce from any Congressional Debate on Oregon, nor from 
 any report of a Congressional Committee on Oregon, nor from 
 any report of any Government Explorer of Oregon, nor from 
 any book of travels or magazine article about Oregon printed 
 prior to the invention of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, in 
 1864-5, but quotes his favorite "original sources" for Oregon 
 history, to wit.: Rev. H. H. Spalding's, Rev. C. Eells' and 
 W. H. Gray's alleged "recollections" from 1864 to 1882, and 
 the "recollections" of others whose ideas are plainly mere 
 echoes of Spalding, C. Eells and Gray. 
 
 Prior to March, 1843, tne Oregon Territory had been far 
 more extensively and thoroughly explored and reported on 
 (in government reports, books of travel and magazine articles) 
 by our citizens, both government expeditions and private cit- 
 izens; more often and more thoroughly debated in Congress; 
 the subject of more numerous and elaborate reports of con- 
 gressional committees; the object of more and more important 
 diplomatic negotiations, than any other territorial acquisition 
 we have made on this continent had been up to the date of its 
 full accomplishment; and to the Oregon acquisition there was 
 far less opposition — in Congress and out of it — than to that 
 of any other of these acquisitions except Florida. 
 
 Oregon had been discussed at seventeen sessions of Con- 
 gress, between 1821 and March 1, 1843. In these debates it 
 was repeatedly declared, beginning as early as 1824, that Ore- 
 gon was easily accessible by wagons over the low passes of 
 the Rocky Mountains, even without any expenditure for road 
 making. 
 
 The official record of these debates covers 300 columns, or 
 about 250,000 words in "Annals of Congress," "Debates in 
 Congress," and "Congressional Globe." 
 
 Yet Dr. Mowry deems it consistent with his duty as an "im- 
 partial historian" not only not to quote one word of all these 
 debates, but not even to mention the above official reports 
 (which are the only "original sources" for these debates). 
 
 To these seventeen sessions there were made eleven reports 
 of committees of the Senate or House of Representatives, and 
 besides there were read in the Senate or House the reports 
 of special agents J. B. Provost (1822), Lieut. W. A. Slacum, 
 of the navy (sent to Oregon by the state department by order 
 of President Jackson in 1835, with special instructions to ex- 
 amine and report on everything important for our government 
 to know about Oregon), whose report was read in the Senate 
 in 1837, an d was often referred to and quoted in later congres- 
 sional discussions and in congressional committee reports, and 
 of Secretary of War Poinsett, in 1840, recommending the es- 
 tablishment of a line of military posts from the Missouri River 
 to the mouth of the Columbia. 
 
26 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 There was also the report of Captain Bonneville to the Sec- 
 retary of War, in 1835, reporting his success in driving twenty 
 loaded wagons through the South Pass over the Rockies and 
 into the Oregon Territory to Green River, in 1832, popularized 
 by Irving's "Bonneville," published in New York and also in 
 England, in 1837, and very widely read in both countries. 
 
 All these committee reports were unanimous, all enthusiastic 
 as to the great value of Oregon to us, and the validity of our 
 title at least as far north as 49 degrees, and each was unani- 
 mously adopted by the body to which it was made. 
 
 As early as 1831 the report of the military committee of the 
 Senate contained the letter of the Rocky Mountain Fur Com- 
 pany to the Secretary of War, dated October 29, 1830, stating 
 that in the preceding five years with from eighty to one hun- 
 dred men, divided into small parties, they had explored the 
 whole region beyond the Rockies from the Gulf of California 
 to the mouth of the Columbia, and had made discoveries and 
 acquired information they deemed it important to communicate 
 to the government. Then, after describing their driving ten 
 wagons loaded with from 1,800 to 2,000 pounds each from St. 
 Louis to the east end of the South Pass and back to St. Louis 
 between April 10 and October 10, 1830, they continue: 
 "This is the first time wagons ever went to the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, and the ease with which it was done proves the facility of 
 communicating overland with the Pacific, the route beyond the 
 mountains to the Great Falls of the Columbia being easier than 
 on this side/' 
 
 The Great Falls of the Columbia are not only west of the 
 Blue Mountains, but more than one hundred miles west of 
 where Whitman six years later established his mission; and 
 this letter of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was often 
 referred to and quoted in later congressional committee re- 
 ports and debates, and in books, newspapers and magazine ar- 
 ticles before 1843. 
 
 These fifteen reports covered about 600 pages, or 350,000 to 
 375,000 words, but of them all Doctor Mowry, as an "impar- 
 tial historian," only names three, and only quotes from one — 
 Cushing's, in 1839 — to tne extent of 297 words, and that only 
 on the wholly unimportant point of whether or not Oregon was 
 included in the Louisiana purchase, while he omits to even 
 allude anywhere in his book to Lieutenant Slacum, or to Poin- 
 sett's report, or to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's wa- 
 gons in 1830, and their extensive explorations in Oregon be- 
 fore 1830, or to Bonneville proving Oregon easily accessible 
 by wagons in 1832, or to the fact that Whitman, in 1835, wrote 
 (in a letter heretofore carefully suppressed) of Bonneville's 
 wagons, and that the route presented little difficulty for wa- 
 gons; and though quoting freely from Gray's and Spalding's 
 
MO WRY' S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 27 
 
 declarations in 1864-5 to J 882 that the route to Oregon was 
 deemed impracticable for wagons as late as 1843, ne omits to 
 quote from Spalding's letter of September 20, 1836 (published 
 in the Missionary Herald, October, 1837, and giving" an account 
 of the overland journey of the Spalding- Whitman party in 
 1836), the following: "We drove a wagon to Snake Fort" (i. 
 e., Fort Boise) "and could have driven it through but for the 
 fatigue of our animals. We expect to get it at some future 
 time." 
 
 Before March 1, 1843, in presidential messages, or in in- 
 structions to diplomats negotiating with England or Russia 
 about Oregon, or in other executive papers, or in correspond- 
 ence which has been in print for fifteen to fifty years past, or 
 in reports of negotiations on Oregon, or in debates in Congress, 
 or in reports of congressional committees, the following states- 
 men are on record as holding that Oregon was of great value 
 to the United States, and could be easily occupied by us, while 
 it was practically impossible (as the world then was) for any 
 European power to people it, and that our title was unques- 
 tionable at least as far north as 49 degrees, and that we should 
 insist on not accepting any line south of 49 degrees as the 
 north boundary of Oregon, viz. : 
 
 Ten men who have been presidents, Jefferson, Madison, 
 Monroe, J. Q. Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, 
 Pierce and Buchanan ; also Calhoun and King, vice-presidents 
 (as had been also Jefferson and Van Buren) ; also Webster, 
 Clay, Everett, Forsyth, secretaries of state (as had been also 
 Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, J. Q. Adams, Van Buren, Cal- 
 houn, Livingston and Buchanan) ; Gallatin, R. Rush, Living- 
 ston and Everett, ministers to England (as were also J. Q. 
 Adams, Van Buren and Buchanan) ; also Middleton, Cambrel- 
 ing and Ingersoll, ministers to Russia, and Archer, Baylies, Ben- 
 ton, Berrien, Lewis Cass, Rufus Choate, Caleb dishing, John 
 J. Crittenden, Drayton, Floyd, John Reed of Massachusetts 
 (''the life member"), Reynolds, Rives, Sevier, Tappan, J. W. 
 Taylor of New York, R. J. Walker, Woodbury and many 
 others of lesser note, while not a single authentic sentence 
 has ever been produced from any man of importance enough 
 ever to have been president or vice-president, or minister to 
 England or Russia, or secretary of state, or even a senator for 
 as much as one full term, which expressed any doubt of our 
 title to all of Oregon south of 49 degrees, or which intimated 
 that we would surrender anything to Great Britain south of 
 49 degrees. 
 
 It is true that Tyler had, to use his own words, "a dream 
 of policy never embodied," about selling that part of the pres- 
 ent state of Washington north and west of the Columbia River 
 to England for a good round sum ; but this wholly impossible 
 
28 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 "dream of policy" necessarily implied not surrendering it, but 
 insisting on 49 degrees as our line to the coast, since England 
 certainly would not buy what we did not own. 
 
 But no reader of Doctor Mowry's book, or of any other book 
 advocating the Whitman legend, will find in it any intimation 
 of these indisputable facts about the position of our leading 
 statesmen on the Oregon question. 
 
 A detailed criticism of Doctor Mowry's treatment of all the 
 "original sources" as to "B" would require very much more 
 space than is available, and as no one has ever pretended that 
 Whitman could by any possibility have influenced the Oregon 
 policy of any other administration than that of Tyler, we will 
 conclude this part of the criticism with a brief examination 
 of his treatment of "original sources" as to the attitude toward 
 and actions upon the Oregon question of President Tyler and 
 Secretary of State D. Webster prior to March 1, 1843. 
 
 On pages 170-71 Doctor Mo wry positively asserts that Web- 
 ster and Tyler thought in the spring of 1843 that Oregon 
 was useless to the United States, because "Lord Ashburton, 
 Sir George Simpson and others with British proclivities had 
 thoroughly indoctrinated our statesmen with the idea that the 
 Rocky Mountains were impassable to wagons, that Oregon 
 could not be peopled from the States, and therefore its value 
 to this country was very small." 
 
 The reader looks through his book from title page to finis 
 in vain for a single sentence in support of this shocking im- 
 peachment of the patriotism and the knowledge of our states- 
 men, except what Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. C. Eells and 
 W. H. Gray thought they remembered (from twenty-three 
 to forty years after the event) that Whitman told them after 
 his return from the States. 
 
 Not a word is there in Doctor Mowry's book which intimates 
 that either Webster or Tyler had ever taken the slightest inter- 
 est in the Oregon question, or had done or said a thing toward 
 securing Oregon to the United States or had any special in- 
 formation about it till Whitman reached Washington, certainly, 
 not till late in March, and more likelv not till April 10 to 15, 
 
 1843. 
 Let us examine the official records and learn the facts. 
 
 1. In both his first and second annual messages in Decem- 
 ber, 184T, and December, 1842, President Tyler had strong 
 paragraphs on Oregon, in the first recommending the estab- 
 lishment of a line of military posts from the Missouri to the 
 Columbia. To neither of these messages does Doctor Mowry 
 even allude. 
 
 2. Elijah White, M. D., had been a Methodist missionary 
 to the Oregon Indians, and stationed nearly 300 miles west of 
 Whitman's mission, from 1838 to 1840, when he was dis- 
 charged. 
 
HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 29 
 
 In January, 1842 (as we know from contemporaneous writ- 
 ten and printed sources), Doctor White appeared in Wash- 
 ington with letters of introduction from Daniel Webster's eld- 
 est son to President Tyler, Secretary Webster and Secretary of 
 the Navy A. P. Upshur, and after interviews with them, and 
 with Secretary of War John C. Spencer, and Senator Linn and 
 other friends of Oregon, by order of the president he was 
 commissioned Indian sub-agent for the region west of the 
 Rockies, and directed to raise as large a company as possible 
 and proceed with them to Oregon, which he did, starting from 
 near Westport, Mo., May 16, 1842, as the leader of the first 
 large overland migration consisting of 112 persons. 
 
 He remained in Oregon some three years, and was the only 
 official ever commissioned by our government to reside in Ore- 
 gon, till after the territory was organized in 1848. Being a 
 very "shifty" and selfish politician, White became exceedingly 
 unpopular and consequently his work for Oregon has re- 
 ceived very scant mention. 
 
 There is no doubt but what a very large part — if not all 
 — of the honest advocacy of the Whitman Saved Oregon story 
 has resulted from transferring to Doctor Whitman the claims 
 which Doctor White made, of the influence on Tyler's Oregon 
 policy, of his interviews with President Tyler and Secretary 
 Webster, just before Ashburton's arrival in Washington, 
 though there is not the slightest reason for believing that Doc- 
 tor White any more than Dr. Whitman really affected in any 
 way the Oregon policy of the national government. 
 
 How does Doctor Mowry treat this matter? Though he 
 mentions "White's Travels in Oregon" (published 1848), in his 
 list of authorities, he does not quote one word from it, and 
 nowhere gives his readers any intimattion that Doctor White 
 had ever been a missionary to the Oregon Indians, or was 
 ever in Oregon before the autumn of 1842, or that he ever was 
 in Washington, or ever saw President Tyler and Secretary 
 Webster, or that he held any official position in Oregon, but 
 only says of him (p. 188) : "Doctor White, with a considerable 
 party of settlers, arrived near Whitman's station early in Sep- 
 tember" (1842). 
 
 3. When in August, 1838, Lieut. Charles Wilkes set sail 
 with six ships and nearly 600 men in command of the greatest 
 exploring expedition our government has ever sent out, Van 
 Buren's administration gave him positive instructions to spend 
 six months in exploring "our territory on the northwest coast of 
 America," and the Columbia River, and the coast of California 
 as far south as San Francisco Bay. 
 
 April 28, 1 841, twenty-four days after Harrison's untimely 
 death brought Tyler to the presidency, Wilkes, with part 
 of his squadron, sighted the mouth of the Columbia, and 
 
30 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 with a ''sloop of war, a brig of war, two launches, ten boats, 
 and upward of 300 men" he was busily engaged till 
 October 10, 1841, in a far more extensive and thorough ex- 
 ploration of Oregon by land and water than any other 
 single expedition has ever made, even to this day. He sur- 
 veyed and chartered Puget's Sound and the navigable 
 waters of the Columbia, visited all the mission stations of 
 the Methodists and of the American Board, and all of the 
 posts of the Hudson's Bay Company south of 49 degrees, except 
 Hall and Boise (which hundreds of Americans had visited), 
 and all the settlements in Oregon. 
 
 He sent a party from Puget's Sound eastward to the Col- 
 umbia and back to the sound by a different route, through 
 the center of the region north and west of the Columbia (be- 
 ing all that was really in dispute, and) of the real value of 
 which (according to Spalding's letter of April 7, 1846, edited 
 by Whitman, and published in Palmer's Journal in 1847) tne 
 missionaries of the American Board knew absolutely nothing 
 until the party sent from the settlements in the Willamette Val- 
 ley explored it in the autumn of 1845, *• e -> three years after 
 Whitman started to the States. 
 
 He also sent a party overland from the Columbia up the 
 Willamette and down the Sacramento to San Francisco. 
 
 He dropped anchor at New York June 10, 1842, and three 
 days later filed in the navy department a most enthusiastic 
 "special report" on Oregon (covering 44 pages foolscap), urg- 
 ing the immense value of the Puget's Sound region, and 
 declaring that in Oregon a man could make a living and ac- 
 quire wealth with only one-third the labor required in the 
 States, and that "No portion of the world beyond the tropics 
 can be found that will yield so readily with moderate labor to 
 the wants of man" as the Oregon territory would. 
 
 These statements, — as powerful stimulants to migration as 
 could well be imagined, — with enough more to make 14 
 pages the House of Representatives took, and on January 4, 
 1843 (when Whitman was near Bent's Fort), added it to the 
 64 pages of the Report of the Military Committee of the 
 House on Oregon (of which 5,000 copies had been printed in 
 May, 1842), and ordered another edition of .5,000 copies 
 printed. 
 
 In a part of this Special Report which was not printed, in 
 discussing passes over the Rocky Mountains, Wilkes wrote: 
 "Finally the two southern routes, which are preferable, sus- 
 ceptible of being used at almost all seasons, and a good wagon 
 road may be constructed with little expense. ... It is read- 
 ily to be perceived that the difficulty of communication with 
 the Territory is far less for us than for the British." There 
 was no need for our government to print this, because it had 
 
HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 31 
 
 printed the same matter substantially in Congressional Debates 
 and Committee Reports many times during the preceding 18 
 years. 
 
 How does Dr. Mowry treat this matter? On pp. 190-191 he 
 has appropriated (without permission from and without credit 
 to the author), a page from a copyrighted manuscript sent 
 him in 1899, by the writer of this criticism, which page does not 
 quote one word from Wilkes' Report, but merely states my in- 
 ferences (written on first reading the manuscript of this 
 Special Report in 1887, at the Navy Department), as to why 
 the Administration would not allow the whole report to be 
 printed in 1843; but though the immediate context of this 
 page of my inferences in the manuscript sent him contained 
 copious quotations from this Special Report of Wilkes, and 
 from his other unpublished dispatches, giving full information 
 about Oregon and the operations and aims of the Hudson's Bay 
 Company, Dr. Mowry not only nowhere copies one word of 
 that context, but he nowhere quotes one word from any of 
 Wilkes' Reports, nor prints one word which will give his 
 readers any information as to the cause of, the time of, or 
 the extent. and values of Wilkes' explorations of Oregon, or 
 of the time when he filed this Special Report, or of the fact 
 that for nine months before Whitman could by any possibility 
 have reached Washington, Tyler's Administration could, on 
 any day, have had interviews with Wilkes and the other officers 
 of his expedition, who knew a vast deal more about all of 
 Oregon that was really in dispute than all the missionaries — 
 Methodist and American Board put together, — did then, or for 
 many years after. 
 
 The facts about Wilkes' exploration and Special Report are 
 so completely destructive of that essential postulate of the 
 Whitman Legend that the Government at Washington was 
 indifferent as to the fate of Oregon, and ignorant as to its 
 value, that not a single advocate of that Legend has ever given 
 his readers any information of the slightest consequence about 
 Wilkes, and most of them (including the two latest advocates 
 of the Legend, Johnson's "Century of Expansion," and Car- 
 penter's "the American Advance,") do not even mention his 
 name ! 
 
 Gray and Mrs. Dye, carefully refraining from stating any- 
 thing of any real value about Wilkes' work, wantonly slander 
 him as follows : "To the disgrace of the leader of that 
 squadron, the general impression of all the early settlers of this 
 country is, to the present day, that he understood and tasted 
 the qualities of Dr. McLoughlin's liquors, and received the 
 polite attentions of the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
 pany with far more pleasure than he looked into or regarded 
 
32 HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 the wants of this infant settlement of his countrymen." (Cf. 
 Gray's History of Oregon, p. 204.) 
 
 " 'Dr. McLoughlin's wine has affected his judgment,' said 
 the men of the mission." 
 
 Then representing Wilkes as conversing with George Aber- 
 nethy, the steward of the Methodist Mission (who had then 
 been in Oregon less than a year and a half), Mrs. Dye con- 
 tinues : " 'Tell me, what do you Americans think of the Hud- 
 son's Bay Company ?' " 
 
 " 'The Hudson's Bay Company is Great Britain's instru- 
 mentality for securing Oregon,' was the answer." 
 
 " 'But,' urged the commodore, 'the missionaries have re- 
 ceived untold favors from the Hudson's Bay Company, and if 
 they are gentlemen it is their duty to return them.' " 
 
 "The missionary faced about in the commodore's path. 'Re- 
 turn them? Certainly. I will exchange favors with Dr. 
 McLoughlin or any other man or set of men, but / zvill not sell 
 country for it.' " 
 
 "Wilkes was almost angry with this blunt missionary." (Cf. 
 McLoughlin and Old Oregon, pp. 176-7.) 
 
 There is not the remotest probability that any part of this 
 dialogue ever was spoken, or that there is a shadow of founda- 
 tion for it, except in Mrs. Dye's unrestrained imagination. 
 
 (4) In April, 1842, Lord Ashburton arrived in Washington, 
 and (after various informal conferences) on June 13, 1842, 
 (the very day Wilkes filed his Special Report on Oregon in 
 the Navy Department), began the formal negotiations which 
 ended August 9, with the signing of the Webster-Ashburton 
 treaty. 
 
 As it was generally understood that he was to treat on all 
 points in dispute, there was much disappointment that Oregon 
 was not included in the treaty, but though Benton on this ac- 
 count assailed it most bitterly in the Senate, he could only rally 
 9 votes against it to 39 for it. 
 
 In December, 1842, Benton returned to the subject, and 
 asserted that Webster had proposed to accept of the line of the 
 Columbia instead of standing firmly for 49 degrees to the 
 Pacific. To this partisan accusation Webster could not in per- 
 son reply in the Senate Chamber, but, fortunately for the 
 vindication of the truth of history, his life-long friend, Rufus 
 Choate, had succeeded him in the Senate, and twice, on Janu- 
 ary 18 and February 3, 1843, while Whitman (of whose exist- 
 ence even there is no evidence that either Tyler or Webster 
 was then aware) was riding east across what is now Kansas, 
 Choate, replying to Benton's accusations, said (on January 18), 
 as summarized by the official reporter in Congressional Globe, 
 27th Congress, 3d Session, pp. 171-2) : "In commenting upon 
 the speech of the Senator from Missouri, (Mr. Benton), who 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 33 
 
 had preceded him, he took occasion to remove an erroneous 
 impression, which, he conceived, was calculated to do great in- 
 justice to a distinguished man, Mr. Webster, who could not 
 there defend himself. He alluded to the fears expressed by 
 the Senator from Missouri, that . . . the rumor must be cor- 
 rect which had got abroad, that a proposition had been made 
 or entertained by the Secretary of State, to settle down upon 
 the Columbia River as the boundary line. Now he was glad 
 to have it in his power to undeceive the Senator, and to assure 
 him, which he did from authority, for he had been requested 
 by the Secretary himself to do it for him, that he never either 
 made or entertained a proposition to admit of any line south 
 of the 49th parallel of latitude, as a negotiable boundary line 
 for the territory of the United States." 
 
 On February 3, 1843, Mr. Choate made another speech 
 (which was printed verbatim in Cong. Globe, App. pages 222- 
 229), and returning to the subject of Benton's accusations, he 
 said: "I desired chiefly to assure the Senator and the Senate 
 that the apprehension intimated by him that a disclosure of 
 these informal communications would disgrace the American 
 Secretary, by showing that he had offered a boundary line south 
 of the parallel of 49 degrees is totally unfounded. He would 
 be glad to hear me say that I am authorized and desired to 
 declare, that in no communication, formal or informal, was 
 such an offer made, and that none such was ever meditated/' 
 
 Precisely why Oregon was not included in the Ashburton 
 treaty could not be stated with due regard to the diplomatic 
 proprieties, either by Choate in 1843, or Webster in his great 
 speech in defense of the Ashburton treaty in 1846, nor by 
 Everett, his life-long friend, in his brief biography of Webster, 
 in which all he says is "Had he (i. e., Webster) supposed an 
 arrangement could have been effected on this basis" (i. e., 49 
 degrees to the coast) "with Lord Ashburton, he would gladly 
 have included it in the treaty of Washington" (Cf. Webster's 
 Works, Vol. 1, Introduction page CXLVITI), because Ash- 
 burton's instructions on Oregon were not printed by the British 
 government and reprinted by our government in "Berlin 
 Arbitration" till 1871-2. These instructions authorized Ash- 
 burton to offer : ( 1 ) The line of the Columbia River from its 
 mouth to the Snake, and thence due east to the summit of the 
 Rockies. This would have given us about nine-fourteenths of 
 the territory south of 49 degrees. 
 
 If he could not secure that line he was (2) authorized to re- 
 new the offer made us in 1824 and 1827 by England, of the 
 line of 49 degrees from the summit of the Rockies to the most 
 northeasterly branch of the Columbia, and from thence the 
 river to the ocean, which would have given us a trifle more 
 than four-fifths of the territory south of 49 degrees, and 
 
.q MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 13) he was positively forbidden to accept of the line of 49 de- 
 grees to the coast. (Cf. "Berlin Arbitration," pages 218-219.) 
 
 The writer hereof called Dr. Mowry's attention, in 1887, to 
 these positive denials by Webster himself through his life-long 
 friend Choate of that totally false charge that in the Winter of 
 1842-43 and Spring of 1843 Webster was indifferent as to the 
 acquisition of Oregon, which is the very cornerstone of the 
 Whitman Saved Oregon story, and has called his attention 
 to them several times since, but he never refers to them, but 
 claims on the "memories" of Gray, Spalding and C. Eells that 
 Webster, in March, 1843, thought Oregon worthless to us. 
 
 (5) In the winter of 1842-43 there was a great debate on 
 Linn's bill for the occupation of Oregon in the Senate (which, 
 it must never be forgotten, is a part of the treaty-making power 
 in our government), the report of which fills 165 columns of 
 the Congressional Globe and its appendix, and in which out 
 of 50 Senators 27 took part, and but one — McDuffie of South 
 Carolina — spoke depreciatingly of Oregon, and he had then 
 only been a member of the Senate 22 days, having been elected 
 to serve for four years of a vacancy caused by death, and he 
 was never able to secure re-election. 
 
 Over and over again it was declared in this debate, alike by 
 those who favored and those who opposed the pending bill, 
 that "The Senate was unanimous in the opinion that our title 
 to Oregon was incontestable at least as far north as 49 degrees," 
 — even McDuffie asserted this, — and the chief opposition to the 
 bill was from strong friends of the Oregon acquisition, who 
 feared that to pass it without first giving the twelve months' 
 notice (which was all that was needed to abrogate the treaty 
 of 1827) would be such an unjustifiable action as to cause 
 Great Britain to declare war, and that we might thereby run 
 great risk of losing Oregon. The bill passed the Senate Feb- 
 ruary 3, 1843, by 2 4 to 22, and of the four absentees two were 
 declared to favor and two to oppose it. But when we come to 
 analyze the vote, Ave find that of the 22 voting "No" nine had de- 
 clared in their speeches that if the provisions which were in 
 plain violation of the treaty of 1827 were dropped, they would 
 support it, so that, without knowing on what grounds the other 
 13 voted "No," it is certain that 24 plus 9 plus 2 equals 35, 
 or one more than two-thirds of the entire Senate, were ready 
 on February 3, 1843, to vote for any legislation about Oregon 
 which we had a right to pass without first giving the twelve 
 months' notice and abrogating the treaty which preserved our 
 rights to the territory and prevented Great Britain from 
 strengthening its claims while the treaty remained in force. 
 How does Dr. Mowry treat this great debate, in which occurred 
 Webster's twice repeated explicit denial (by the mouth of 
 Choate) of Benton's slanderous and baseless accusation that 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. *35 
 
 Webster was ready to accept the Columbia or some other line 
 south of 49 degrees as the north boundary of Oregon, which 
 is the very cornerstone of the Whitman Saved Oregon story ? 
 
 He neither quotes a word from this debate, nor gives any 
 intimation, of its importance, and only says (p. 189) : "During 
 the winter of 1842-3 a great debate on the Oregon question 
 took place in the Senate, which lasted a number of weeks, and 
 brought out a great diversity of views concerning the Oregon 
 question." 
 
 Unable to find a sentence of any contemporaneous govern- 
 ment document or letter, or even newspaper statement, that 
 Whitman ever had any interview with President Tyler or Sec- 
 retary Webster, or that he in the least degree influenced the 
 Oregon policy of Tyler's administration, after quoting freely 
 from the unsupported "recollections" of Gray, Spalding, C. 
 Eells, Dr. Geiger and others between 1865 and 1882 as to what 
 they thought Whitman had told them in 1843 to l &47> Dr. 
 Mowry prints on pages 172-3 a letter dated June 6, 1898, from 
 Dr. L. G. Tyler, President of William and Mary College, 
 Virginia, and some extracts from his "Letters and Times of 
 the Tylers," which he declares establish his claims about 
 Whitman having interviewed Tyler and influenced his Oregon 
 policy. 
 
 Not only are the letter and the quotations entirely incon- 
 clusive, but less than a year after the date of that letter he 
 quotes, the writer of this review furnished to President L. G. 
 Tyler extensive typewritten copies of the correspondence of 
 Whitman and his associates with the American Board, which 
 Dr. Mowry and the other advocates of the Whitman Legend 
 have so carefully suppressed, and also full information about 
 Dr. White and his work for Oregon (of which he wrote me 
 that he had never heard before), with the result that he was 
 speedily convinced that both he and his half-brother, John Tyler, 
 Jr., private secretary to President John Tyler, had been im- 
 posed upon by Barrows' "Oregon" fwich was published (in 
 1883) and read by them just before he had his first conversation 
 about Whitman with John Tyler, Jr.), and had confounded Dr. 
 White with Dr. Whitman ; and that Dr. Whitman had no in- 
 fluence on the Oregon policy of President Tyler. 
 
 (Cf. the review of "The Marcus Whitman Legend," by 
 Professor Hodder, in the Dial for January 16, 1902, in which 
 *(p. 42) Professor Hodder writes, "That Dr. Tyler does not 
 regard it" (i. e., what Dr. Mowry has quoted from him) "as 
 sustaining the claim that Whitman influenced the administra- 
 tion, appears from a recent letter to the writer of this review, 
 in which he says, T do not believe that Dr. Whitman controlled 
 the policy of President Tyler's administration in any way.' " 
 
 Had Dr. Mowry cared to quote original and strictly con- 
 
36 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 temporaneous sources on President Tyler's administration, he 
 could easily have found in that same Vol. 2, of "Letters and 
 Times of the Tylers," on pages 447, 448 and 449, over the 
 signature of President John Tyler himself, in three letters to 
 his son Robert, the conclusive evidence that as late as Decem- 
 ber, 1845, and January, 1846 (i. e., more than two and a half 
 years after Whitman's visit to the States), neither Whitman 
 nor anyone else had changed Tyler's ideas as to the best policy 
 to pursue on the Oregon and California acquisition problem, 
 and that precisely what his correspondence shows that he 
 hoped to accomplish in 1842-3, he still, in 1845-6, thought 
 should be attempted by President Polk. The first letter is 
 dated December 11, 1845, an d after commenting on President 
 Polk's discussion of the Oregon question in his first annual 
 message, continues, "I looked exclusively to an adjustment by 
 the 49th parallel, and never dreamed for a moment of surren- 
 dering the free navigation of the Columbia I 
 
 never dreamed of ceding this country, 1 unless for the greater 
 equivalent of California, which I fancied Great Britain might 
 be able to obtain for us through her influence with Mexico ; 
 and this was but a dream of policy which was never embodied. 
 I confess that throughout the whole of this business I have 
 been firmly impressed with the belief that our true policy was 
 to let things take their natural course, under an improved 
 treaty of joint policy." 
 
 The second was dated December 23, 1845, an( l again dis- 
 cussing the Oregon question and Polk's message thereon, he 
 wrote, "I think it would be a high stroke of policy to interest 
 Great Britain in our negotiation with Mexico, so as to lead 
 her to concede California, and thus to bring about a tripartite 
 treaty, according to Great Britain the line she offers" (i. e., 49 
 degrees to the most northeasterly branch of the Columbia, and 
 thence the river to the Pacific), "and we take California, Great 
 Britain to pay so much towards our purchase. It would re- 
 quire great skill to bring this about." 
 
 If it would have required "great skill" for Polk, fresh from 
 a triumphant election by the people, and with a good working 
 majority in both Houses of Congress eager to support him, to 
 carry out this "dream of policy," the reader can see how utterly 
 impossible it would have been for Tyler, hated by the Whig 
 leaders, and distrusted by the most influential Democrats, and 
 only half supported part of the time by discordant factions of» 
 both parties, to ever have "embodied" his "dream of policy" 
 about Oregon in a treaty that would have had any chance of 
 securing two-thirds of the Senate in favor of its ratification. 
 
 The third was dated January 1, 1846, and after expressing 
 his objections to war with Mexico and England, if it can hon- 
 orably be avoided, he continues, "The United States requires 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 37 
 
 still a peace of 20 years, and then they hold in their hands the 
 destiny of the human race. Ifrit if war does come, we shall 
 fight on the side of right. Our claim to Oregon to the 49th 
 degree is clear; what lies beyond is attended with colorable 
 title on the part of Great Britain by the exploration of Frazer's 
 river by McKenzie; but it is only colorable." 
 
 DR. MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF THE "ORIGINAL SOURCES^ AS TO 
 WHITMAN'S TRUE RELATIONS TO THE 1843 MIGRATION. 
 
 As to (C) the only really "original sources" that it is certain 
 Dr. Mowry has examined are : 
 
 (a) Four letters from Whitman, the first from St. Louis, 
 May 12, 1843, tne other three from Shawnee Indian Mission, 
 May 2J, 28 and 30, 1843; tne ^ rst an< ^ * ast to ^ ev - D. Greene, 
 Secretary, and the second and third to two of Whitman's 
 brothers-in-law. 
 
 All about the migration in the first is the following: "I 
 have made up my mind that it would not be expedient to take 
 any families this year, except such as can go at this time." 
 
 On page 181, Dr. Mowry prints part of this letter, but care- 
 fully omits the above paragraph. 
 
 In that of May 27, i. e., five days after the migration had 
 started from its camp, near Independence, Mo., for Oregon, all 
 that relates to it is the following: 
 
 "I cannot tell you very much about the migration to Oregon. 
 They appear very willing, and, I have no doubt, are generally of 
 an enterprising character. There are over 200 men, besides 
 women and children, as it is said. No one can well tell until 
 we are all on the road and get together how many there are. 
 Some have been gone a week, and others have not yet started. 
 I hope to start to-morrow. I shall have an easy journey, as I 
 have not much to do, having no one depending on me." 
 
 To this letter Dr. Mowry never alludes. 
 
 I have conducted sundry excursions to the Rocky Mountain 
 and Pacific coast regions myself, but while they were gathering 
 I did not stay ten miles away from their rendezvous, nor wait 
 for an invitation to visit and address them, nor say — after 
 they were fairly started — that "I could not tell very much about 
 them," and, still less, that "I expected to have an easy journey, 
 not having much to do, having no one depending upon me," 
 and if there were no other letter but this — the authenticity of 
 which is beyond dispute — it would utterly destroy the whole 
 story that Whitman had any special influence on or concern 
 about the originating or organizing of that migration, or felt 
 any responsibility for its getting through to Oregon, with or 
 without wagons. 
 
 In that of May 28 he wrote: 
 
38 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 "I have been, as it were, waiting for three weeks 
 
 I shall start tomorrow or next day. Some of the emigrants 
 
 have been gone a week, and others are just going 
 
 I hope to be expeditious in traveling. After we get to Ft. 
 Hall I shall try to go on rapidly, if not before." From this 
 Dr. Mowry (erroneously stating that it was written from St. 
 Louis) quotes, on pages 196-7, considerably more than there is 
 space for here, but carefully omits the last two sentences above 
 quoted, which show that a week after the migration had started 
 (except the few stragglers which always bring up the rear of 
 such a great movement), Whitman intended on reaching Fort 
 Hall (beyond which there was no danger from Indians) to 
 leave the migration behind, though that was the only part 
 where there was not a well-known wagon road, and where he 
 could be of any special service to it. 
 
 In that of May 30 he wrote: 
 
 "You will be surprised to see that we are not yet started. 
 . . . I shall start to-morrow. I regret that I could not 
 have spent some of the time spent here in suspense with my 
 friends in the East. I have only a lad of thirteen, my nephew, 
 with me. I take him to have someone to stay with Mrs. W. 
 
 "I cannot give you much of an account of the emigrants 
 until we get on the road. It is said that there are over 200 
 men, besides women and children." 
 
 The proper place for this was on page. 197, after that of May 
 28, but Dr. Mowry neither prints it there, nor puts a footnote 
 of reference to it, but on pages 262-3 he puts it in the Appendix, 
 where few of his readers will peruse it, and fewer note its 
 significance in relation to the claim that Whitman was promi- 
 nent in originating, organizing and leading the 1843 migration. 
 
 (Cf., for the full text of the letters of May 27 and 28, 
 Tr. Or. Pi. Asscn., 1891, pp. 177-9, and for those of May 12 
 and 30, Vol. 138, MSS. A. B. C. F. M.) 
 
 (b) The only detailed contemporaneous account of the 
 migration of 1843 which has ever been printed, being Part 2 
 of George Wilkes' History of Oregon, published in New York 
 in the spring of 1845. 
 
 This account covers 50 pages, or about 40,000 words, and is 
 unquestionably the account which Burnett (Old Pioneer, p. 
 177) states that he wrote in the winter of 1843-44, "in letters 
 to the New York Herald, covering about 125 pages of fools- 
 cap." 
 
 Burnett kept a "concise journal" of the whole trip from 
 Missouri to Walla Walla, and so far as known no other journal 
 of that trip was kept, or, if kept, preserved. 
 
 The Herald only printed five of these letters in its issues for 
 December 28, 1844, January 5, 6 (two letters) and 18, 1845, 
 breaking off without any explanation or apology, when the 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 39 
 
 migration had not crossed the south fork of the Platte and had 
 not traveled one-fourth of the way to the settlements in Oregon. 
 These letters were reprinted in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, 
 December, 1902, with certain editorial comments, which, as far 
 as they reflect on Wilkes' character and treatment of the Bur- 
 nett account, seem to me wholly unwarranted by the facts in 
 the case. 
 
 A careful comparison, sentence by sentence, of the Herald 
 letters with the narrative in Wilkes covering the same part of 
 the journey shows that every fact of the slightest importance 
 in the Herald letters is also in the account in Wilkes, while a 
 similar comparison of every statement of any fact of the 
 slightest importance in the rest of the narrative in Wilkes, with 
 contemporaneous letters, and with parts of Fremont's report 
 covering the same facts shows the account in Wilkes to be 
 correct on every point of the slightest consequence. 
 
 This matter is fully discussed in the chapter on "The Truth 
 About the Discovery of Routes Practicable For and the De- 
 velopment of the First Transcontinental Wagon Road as 
 Shown by the Original Documents" in my forthcoming book 
 on "The Acquisition of the Old Oregon Territory and the 
 Long Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman" and space 
 will not permit farther discussion of it here. 
 
 Turning now to the account in Wilkes, we find that Burnett 
 says (p. 6y, George Wilkes), "A meeting was held in the 
 latter part of the day" (May 18, 1843) "which resulted in ap- 
 pointing a committee to return to Independence, and make in- 
 quiries of Dr. Whitman, missionary, who had an establishment 
 on the Walla Walla, respecting the practicabilities of the 
 route." 
 
 Although this account in Wilkes does not say another word 
 about Whitman, or about any information received from or 
 services rendered by him till September 23, 1843 (when the 
 migration was 31 miles west of Fort Boise), Dr. Mowry en- 
 larges (p. 193) on what he imagines Whitman told this com- 
 mittee. 
 
 (Page 85, George Wilkes). Under date of September 23, 
 1843, a ft er stating that they were obliged to make a most un- 
 comfortable camp, with no water except in a puddle in the bed 
 of a dry creek, Burnett continues: "Two miles further on 
 would have taken us to a good encampment, with plenty of fine 
 range and water, but the Indian pilot who had been employed 
 for us by Dr. Whitman was ahead, and out of reach, with the 
 foremost wagons." 
 
 There is not another mention of Whitman, directly or indi- 
 rectly, in the whole narrative, till (George Wilkes, p. 89) it 
 describes their arrival at his mission station, October 8, 1843, 
 and their purchase from him of wheat at $1 and potatoes at 40 
 
4 o MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 cents a bushel, and no intimation in the whole narrative that 
 Whitman had anything whatever to do in originating, organiz- 
 ing, or (except in the hiring of the Indian guide beyond 
 Boise) in leading this migration anywhere from the Missouri 
 frontier to the Columbia River. Dr. Mowry wholly ignores 
 this on page 85, and though he quotes to the extent of more 
 than 600 words from other parts of this account (which he 
 three times erroneously ascribes to Wilkes, who, he says, was 
 a member of the migration, though, in fact, he was a New 
 York City Democratic politician and newspaper man and had 
 nothing to do with the migration), there is not in all he quotes 
 the least reference to Whitman, except in the extract from 
 page 67 above. 
 
 DR. MOWRY'S DISINGENUOUS TREATMENT OF SUNDRY "WIT- 
 NESSES" WHOSE ALLEGED "RECOLLECTIONS^ HE HAS SUB- 
 STITUTED FOR THE ORIGINAL SOURCES OF OREGON 
 HISTORY. 
 
 Having seen how Dr. Mowry has juggled with the real 
 "original sources" as to the origin and purpose of Whitman's 
 ride, let us briefly glance at his treatment of the chief witnesses 
 whose vague and contradictory and demonstrably false "recol- 
 lections" he substitutes for the genuine "original sources." 
 
 There would never have been any Whitman Saved Oregon 
 story without the alleged "recollections" of three men (never 
 published till 1864-5-6), viz.: Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. 
 Cushing Eells and Mr. W. H. Gray. 
 
 Two of these three signed the brief "Resolve" of September 
 28, 1842 (quoted on p. 13 ante), which authorized Whit- 
 man to go to the States, not on any political errand, but "to 
 confer with the committee of the A. B. C. F. M. in regard to 
 the interests of this mission," while the third one, W. H. 
 Gray, though he did not sign it, (because no longer a member 
 of the mission, having just deserted it), unquestionably knew 
 of it, and understood perfectly well the true origin and pur- 
 pose of Whitman's ride. Yet each of these three men, in their 
 first published versions of the Whitman saved Oregon story 
 explicitly stated that the sole purpose of that ride was to save 
 Oregon to the nation, without the least hint that there was any 
 missionary business impelling him to make the ride, and no 
 one of them ever, to the day of his death, in any of his "state- 
 ments" and newspaper articles in defense of the saving Oregon 
 story, ever admitted knowing anything about the order of the 
 Board discontinuing three out of the four stations of the mis- 
 sion, including Spalding's and Whitman's, and recalling to 
 the States Spalding and Gray (i. e., two out of the five men 
 connected with the mission), or about recollecting that that 
 
HOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 41 
 
 order was even mentioned at the special meeting of the mis- 
 sion, held September 26-27, 1842, though the official record of 
 that meeting (which they all refrain from quoting), shows that 
 it discussed nothing but that order, and Gray's sudden (and, as 
 Eells and Walker both declared) dishonorable desertion of the 
 mission. Dr. Mowry, knowing that this claim that the sole 
 purpose of Whitman's ride was to save Oregon is false, in all 
 his extensive quotations from Gray, Spalding and C. Eells, 
 carefully refrains from even mentioning that they had ever 
 made any such claim. 
 
 Furthermore, except Spalding's signature to the resolve of 
 September 28, 1842, Spalding and Gray wrote nothing con- 
 temporaneously (so far as has ever yet appeared) as to the 
 origin and purpose of Whitman's ride, but when, in 1865-6, 
 they published their version of the Saving Oregon theory of 
 that ride, they agreed in ascribing it to a taunt at a crowded 
 dinner table at Fort Walla Walla a few days before he started 
 on Ooctober 3, 1842, anent the announcement that the Red 
 River emigrants would soon arrive to settle Oregon and secure 
 it for the Hudson's Bay Company, and to the end of their lives 
 (Spalding died in 1874, and Gray in 1889), they both insisted 
 that that was the true account of the origin of Whitman's ride. 
 But it having been proved beyond any possibility of dispute 
 that the whole Walla Walla dinner story is pure fiction, be- 
 cause the Red River settlers came in 1841, as stated, not only 
 in Spalding's diary for September 10, 1841, and in E. Walker's 
 diary for September 21, 1841, but also in Dr. Whitman's letter 
 of November 11, 1841, in which, out of about 6,000 words in 
 the letter, Whitman devotes the whole of thirty words to the 
 bare announcement of their arrival (in connection with other 
 matters of much more personal concern to himself), and to 
 show how unimportant in his mind was their coming, puts 
 those thirty words in a parenthesis, as follows: "(A large 
 party of settlers as half servants to the company, were at that 
 time" (i. e., October 4, 1841,) "at the fort,"" (i. e., Walla 
 Walla), "on their way from the Red River to settle on the 
 Cowlitz.)" Dr. Mowry, by not only not even mentioning it, 
 but by substituting for it Rev. C. Eells' entirely different and 
 totally contradictory account, totally repudiates Gray's and 
 Spalding's account of the origin of that ride, which was the 
 only thing about it that was a matter within their own per- 
 sonal experience, and concerning which, therefore, their 
 recollections, if correct, might have had some evi- 
 dential value, but he quotes extensively and endorses 
 as correct the "recollections" of Spalding and Gray as 
 to what took place between Whitman and Tyler and 
 Webster. That is, totally repudiating as wholly untrue, 
 all that Gray and Spalding constantly declared as long as 
 
42 MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 
 
 they lived was the true account of all about Whitman's ride 
 that came within their own personal observation and experi- 
 ence, to wit., its origin, our author imposes on the credulity 
 of his readers what these same men "recollected," from 
 twenty-three to forty years after the event, about what they 
 thought Whitman told them took place more than 3,000 miles 
 away from them, and concerning which, as they have never 
 been able to produce so much as one short sentence in any con- 
 temporary book, magazine, newspaper, government document, 
 diary or letter, that supports their "recollections," it is certain 
 that they knew nothing except from hearsay, or a lively imag- 
 ination. But that is not the end of Dr. Mowry's offense in 
 these quotations from Gray and Spalding, for both of them 
 "recollected" as clearly as they did anything else of what they 
 claimed took place in Washington, that Whitman succeeded in 
 preventing the trading off of Oregon in the Ashburton treaty, 
 "for a codfishery on Newfoundland/' (Cf., Lecture by Rev. 
 H. H. Spalding, quoted in Sen. Ex. Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3d 
 session; also W. H. Gray's Hist, of Or., pp. 290, 316.) That, 
 however, having been proved by the date of the signing of the 
 Ashburton treaty to have been as destitute of truth as their 
 account of the origin of Whitman's ride, Dr. Mowry from 
 his quotations from Gray and Spalding carefully omits what 
 they "recollected" about the Ashburton treaty, though as late 
 as 1870 and 1871 they both "recollected" the Ashburton treaty 
 as certainly as anything else either "recollected" — or imagined 
 — about Whitman's ride. 
 
 Perrin B. Whitman, the nephew, thirteen years old, whom 
 Dr. Whitman took back with him in 1843, on February 10, 
 1882, wrote a letter from Lapwai Indian Agency, Idaho, to 
 Rev. M. Eells (which is to be found on pages 12 and 13 of 
 Mr. Eells' pamphlet, "Marcus Whitman, M. D. Proofs of 
 His Work in Saving Oregon to the United States and in Pro- 
 moting the Immigration of 1843." Portland, Ore., 1883). 
 
 In it Perrin Whitman wrote, "I heard him" (i. e., Dr. Whit- 
 man) "say repeatedly on the journey, and after we reached his 
 mission, Wailatpu, that he went to the States in the winter 
 of 1842 and 1843 for the sole purpose of bringing an immigra- 
 tion with wagons across the plains to Oregon." 
 
 This Dr. Mowry quotes (on p. 137), but omits the word 
 "sole." It would be interesting, if space permitted, to ex- 
 amine the multitude of geographical and historical errors in 
 this book not herein touched upon. 
 
 Suffice it to say that some of them are extremely laughable 
 and others saddening as illustrations of the old adage, "How 
 desperate are the shifts of a confirmed -theorist," but as Dr. 
 Mowry has written all the rest of the book on the same lines 
 as the parts herein criticized, after this examination of his 
 
MOWRY'S TREATMENT OF ORIGINAL SOURCES. 43 
 
 treatment of every important original source, it seems un- 
 necessary to further notice his treatment of minor "original 
 sources" or his numerous errors in other matters. 
 
 Dr. Mowry asserts that his "Marcus Whitman" is a "his- 
 tory," and that "from first to last it deals with facts," and very 
 positively denies that it is "an embellished story." 
 
 Just how he "deals with facts" is plainly shown herein, and 
 one cannot help wondering what sort of a book he would have 
 produced if he had exercised his intellect in the production of 
 an "embellished story" instead of "history." 
 
 It is said that a friend whom he did not wish to disoblige 
 having persistently importuned President Lincoln to write a 
 notice of a book, which he could not conscientiously commend, 
 Lincoln at last penned the following: 
 
 "Having read Dr. Blank's book, I am free to say that, for 
 people who like this kind of a book, this seems to me an ex- 
 cellent sample of the kind of a book they like." 
 
 So, for those who think the proper course for a historical 
 writer to pursue with all "original sources" that cannot be 
 twisted so as to support his preconceived theories, is to either 
 ignore or deliberately suppress or misquote them, or to sub- 
 stitute for them the contradictory and demonstrably false 
 "recollections" of their authors written 30 to 40 years later, 
 Dr. Mowry's "Marcus Whitman" may be recommended as a 
 very finely executed specimen of the kind of writing they ar^ 
 willing to accept as historical 
 
WHY HIS SEARCH (?) FOR THE TRUTH OF HIS- 
 TORY WAS A FAILURE. 
 
 Being a Review of Rev. Myron Eells' "Reply to Professor 
 Bourne." By Principal Wm. I. Marshall of Chicago. 
 
 (Copyright, 1903, by Wm. I. Marshall.) 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 To examine critically Rev. M. Eells' "Reply to Professor 
 Bourne's The Legend of Marcus Whitman/ " is very difficult, 
 because Mr. Eells' methods are so unlike those of careful his- 
 torians that one accustomed to reading books whose authors 
 summarize fairly, and quote honestly and accurately the au- 
 thorities to which they refer, and never suppress all mention 
 of authorities which they cannot twist to support their own 
 preconceived theories, is continually bewildered in reading this 
 "Reply," and in doubt whether what he encounters on almost 
 every page is evidence of incapacity or dishonesty. 
 
 MR. EELLS' NATURAL LIMITATIONS. 
 
 The circumstances of Mr. Eells' life make it impossible to 
 hold him to a very high standard of performance in many re- 
 spects. Born on the extremest frontier in a log cabin, and 
 living nearly all his life on the frontier, (mostly around Indian 
 agencies, which are not generally believed to be places specially 
 stimulating to careful research, accurate statements or candor 
 in discussion), he has had little opportunity to work in any 
 library of even moderate size, and, totally lacking scientific 
 training, he seems entirely destitute of any comprehension of 
 the use of scientific methods in historical research, and of what 
 constitutes valid evidence. Naturally, also, as a son of Rev. 
 C. Eells, one of the originators of the "Whitman Saved 
 
46 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH {?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Oregon" story, he has the strongest kind of personal and fam- 
 ily interest in finding some method of making that story appear 
 to be true. 
 
 But when all allowances have been made for these matters, 
 and also for his apparently total lack of any sense of humor, the 
 public had a right to demand of him either that he should not 
 have written at all, or that he should have produced a much 
 more creditable book than he has, since all these deficiencies 
 cannot justify the deliberate concealment or misquotation of 
 such authorities as are perfectly well known to the author. 
 
 HIS ONE GREAT ADVANTAGE — WHICH HE CAREFULLY REFRAINED 
 FROM USING. 
 
 It must also be remembered that with all these deficiencies 
 he has one qualification that should have enabled him speedily 
 to get at the whole truth about Marcus Whitman, and that is, 
 that as a son of Rev. C. Eells, he could have freest access to all 
 the correspondence of Whitman and all his associates with the 
 American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, and 
 also more easily than any one else could get access to their cor- 
 respondence with relations and friends, and their journals. He 
 makes great claims to fairness and moderation and candor and 
 desire to have the truth appear, declaring (p. 37), "The writer 
 has no objection to scientific history as above defined, namely, 
 the facts written at or near the time they occurred. He has 
 tried to obtain all such scientific history that he could for all 
 his writings. He has searched old books, pamphlets and let- 
 ters for it. He thinks highly of it, and more highly of only one 
 thing, and that is the truth. This he places above everything," 
 and (p. 43) "The writer believes in trying to find the truth of 
 history, wherever it can be found." 
 
 HIS STRANGE NOTIONS OF CANDOR AND FAIRNESS SHOWN IN HIS 
 TREATMENT OF PROFESSOR JOHN FISKE's COMMENDA- 
 TORY LETTER TO ME. 
 
 Let us see how his "Reply" compares with this alleged can- 
 dor and fairness and desire to discover and state the truth 
 "wherever found." As the "Reply" is partly aimed at my dis- 
 cussion of Professor Bourne's paper at the 1900 meeting of 
 the American Historical Association, I will first examine his 
 treatment of that discussion, as printed in Transactions Ameri- 
 can Historical Association for 1900, pages 219-236 (and here- 
 with reprinted), of which he had a copy with my compliments. 
 On pages 20-22 he takes up the account of my work in driving 
 the Whitman Saved Oregon story, (and all the misrepresenta- 
 tions about Oregon history which are necessary postulates of 
 that story) out of school histories, and says that it was done 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 47 
 
 "secretly/' and "was a stab in the dark/' and that I "was afraid 
 to meet my opponents" (f. e., the advocates of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon story) "in argument," and that I knew that my 
 side "had been worsted in the discussion on the Pacific coast." 
 Nothing farther from the truth than these statements are can 
 be imagined. I well knew that notwithstanding the careful 
 suppression of all the conclusive contemporaneous correspond- 
 ence and diaries of Whitman and his associates, which were in 
 possession of the advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon 
 story, and notwithstanding its opponents were heavily handi- 
 capped by their inability to obtain access, in the States of 
 Oregon and Washington, to many of the most important gov- 
 ernment documents bearing on the case, the weight of argu- 
 ment was so vastly against the Saving Oregon theory of Whit- 
 man's ride that no candid and fairly well-informed historian 
 who will sit down and read that discussion as it appeared from 
 1879 to 1885, in the columns of the Portland Oregonian, the 
 Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Tacoma Ledger, and in 
 pamphlets which were mainly reprints of tt(e nswjpaper arti- 
 cles, will, when he has finished them, have any confidence in 
 any version of the Saving Oregon theory of that winter's ride. 
 But I also well knew that scarcely an echo of that discussion 
 was heard east of the Rocky Mountains, except among the 
 very devoted adherents of the American Board of Foreign 
 Missions, and the Presbyterian Missionary Board, very few of 
 whom read any of the arguments and evidence against the 
 Saving Oregon theory, but only the specious and sophistical 
 defence of it by Rev. Thomas Laurie, D. D., (the official his- 
 torian of the American Board), in the Missionary Herald, for 
 February and September, 1885. 
 
 MY OFFER TO W. A. MOWRY TO REST THE CASE ON THE CORRE- 
 SPONDENCE OF WHITMAN AND HIS ASSOCIATES IF HE 
 WOULD INDUCE THE A. B. C F. M. TO PRINT IT. 
 
 As to the charge that I was afraid to meet the advocates of 
 the Whitman Saved Oregon story in argument, it only needs 
 to be. said that nearly six years ago I proposed to Dr. W. A. 
 Mowry, that if he would induce the American Board to print 
 every letter in its archives from Mr. and Mrs. Whitman, to- 
 gether with such other letters as I should name from the corre- 
 spondence of the other members of the Oregon Mission, viz. : 
 Rev. C. Eells, Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. Elkanah Walker, 
 Rev. A. B. Smith, Mr. W. H. Gray and Mr. Cornelius Rogers, 
 together with such letters as I should select from the published 
 correspondence of the above parties, and such as I should 
 select from the correspondence of Rev. G. H. Atkinson with 
 the American Board, so that the world might have a chance 
 
48 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (/) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 to judge exactly what the facts are about the founding and 
 continuance and termination of the Whitman-Spalding-Eells 
 Mission, and the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride, I 
 would contribute $500 (which would be fully one-half of the 
 necessary expense of it) towards the cost of the publication, 
 and would rest the question of the origin, purposes and results 
 of Whitman's ride entirely on those letters and on the reports 
 of the action of the Prudential Committee of the Board thereon 
 as shown by its official records, and by the letters which its 
 Secretary sent in reply to them. My only conditions were that 
 they should print the full text of those letters, and the replies 
 to them, and the action of the Prudential Committee on them, 
 with correct copies of the memoranda showing the date of re- 
 ceipt of each letter, and that they should print and put on sale 
 at least 2,500 copies and furnish me free of cost 250 copies. 
 While I only stipulated for the publication of such letters as I 
 should select, I distinctly stated that it was only because of the 
 great volume of other letters which related merely to routine 
 missionary business, and do not possess the least value for the 
 purposes of the general historian, casting no light whatever on 
 any controverted points, but I also added, that if the American 
 Board thought the publication of this inconsequential corre- 
 spondence would be of any benefit, I should not object, and if 
 they would only furnish to the public an accurate copy of the 
 text of the letters and records I asked them to print, I did not 
 care how much more they printed, nor how many notes and 
 explanations they might print in an appendix or as footnotes. 
 To this letter I never received any reply. That offer still holds 
 good, but there is no probability that it will ever be accepted. 
 
 MYSELF IMPOSED ON BY THE WHITMAN SAVED OREGON STORY 
 FROM 1877 TO l882. 
 
 It is now more than tw r enty-seven years since I began the 
 study of the acquisition of the Oregon Territory, and for five 
 years I was imposed upon by the Saving Oregon theory of 
 Whitman's ride, as told by Gray, and Spalding, and Rev. C. 
 Eells. Twenty-two years ago I found that story to be fictitious, 
 and since that have never faltered in my determination to pub- 
 lish the truth about it, as soon as I should find myself able to 
 do so. Compelled to work steadily at my profession as a 
 teacher to support my family, and caught and nearly ruined in 
 the panic of 1893, I have not yet found myself able to publish 
 the indisputable evidence which I have been so long and care- 
 fully collecting. Finding the Whitman Saved Oregon story, 
 with all its astonishing perversions of the real history of the 
 longest, most interesting, most successful and most remarkable 
 diplomatic struggle we have ever made for territory was being 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 49 
 
 imposed upon the children of the nation through their school 
 histories, I decided six years ago, that though I could not 
 afford to publish a book, I could (as my daughter was my tpye- 
 writer) afford to send typewritten criticisms of the amazing 
 errors into which some of the ablest of our historians had fallen 
 through accepting Gray, and Spalding, and C. Eells, and Bar- 
 rows, and Nixon, and Mowry, and Coffin, and Craighead, and 
 M. Eells as trustworthy authorities, instead of going to original 
 sources, as I had done in all cases. These manuscripts have 
 been read by some three-score historians and historical students, 
 including Professors of History in Universities and Colleges, 
 Teachers of History in Normal, and High, and Elementary 
 Schools, Judges, Clergymen, Editors and Librarians, and ex- 
 cept W. A. Mowry, every person — man or woman — who has 
 read even one-quarter part of them has been convinced that 
 they completely overthrow each and every form of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon story; and nearly all of these persons had been 
 believers in the Whitman Saved Oregon story, and many of 
 them had put it in their books or otherwise publicly advocated 
 it. Dr. Mowry was not convinced, not, as Mr. Eells says, "Be- 
 ~cause he had studied both sides of the subject;" but it is because 
 his "study of the subject" has been controlled by those unique 
 ideas of the limits of historical investigation and publication, 
 stated in his letter of December 9, 1898 (Cf. p. 9 ante for this), 
 that he still asserts that "Whitman Saved Oregon." To all the 
 professional historians, and also the compilers of school his- 
 tories, to whom I sent my manuscripts, I wrote urging each to 
 subject my statements to the most rigorous examination, to 
 verify for themselves the fairness of any or all summaries, and 
 the accuracy of any or all quotations, and to have the kindness 
 to inform me if they found any erroneous statement of fact, or 
 inaccuracy in quotation or unfairness in summarizing such 
 documents as I could not find space to quote in full, believing 
 that any one who points out an error I have made does me a 
 kindness, by enabling me to be wiser hereafter than I have been 
 heretofore. To help them to arrive at the exact facts about the 
 arguments advanced by the advocates of the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story, I sent several of them for examination a copy of 
 Rev. M. Eells' pamphlet, "Marcus Whitman, M. D., Proofs of 
 His Work in Saving Oregon to the United States, etc." Port- 
 land, 1883, and also a copy of the "Whitman Controversy," 
 Portland, 1885, and only regretted that I had not copies enough 
 of both to have sent a copy o'f each with each set of my MSS. 
 No one of those who read my MSS. found a single error of 
 fact, or a single inaccurate quotation, or a single unfair sum- 
 mary. Among those who having heard of my MSS. asked the 
 privilege of reading them was the late Professor John Fiske, 
 and when through with them he wrote me a letter which the 
 
50 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 reader will find printed verbatim in the reprint from the Trans- 
 actions of the American Historical Association for 1900, here- 
 with, pages 229-30. 
 
 Having before him in my pamphlet reprint from Transac- 
 tions of the American Historical Association, 1900, this letter 
 of Dr. Fiske, as well as letters from Dr. Edward Eggleston, 
 Professor John B. McMaster and several other historians, en- 
 dorsing the correctness of my conclusions, and well knowing 
 that very few of his readers would ever have a chance to know 
 anything about these letters except what he might choose to 
 state in his "Reply," how does our candid author, seeking for 
 the "truth of history wherever found" treat this matter? He 
 nowhere gives his readers any intimation that anybody had 
 changed his opinions about the Whitman Saved Oregon story 
 as the result of my labors, nor that any historian except Pro- 
 fessor Fiske had written any kind of a letter to me about my 
 MSS., and, quoting from my discussion in December, 1900, of 
 Professor Bourne's paper, seven phrases, aggregating thirty- 
 six words, entirely disconnected from their contexts, he says 
 (p. 7) : "Was it strange that Professor Fiske wrote him, T 
 think the force of your arguments would be enhanced if your 
 style of expression were now and then a little less vehe- 
 ment ?' " Concerning this, it only need be said that Professor 
 Fiske's kindly criticism, not of any errors of fact or of quota- 
 tion, but only of my style of expression, had no reference to 
 anything in the pamphlet to which Mr. Eells refers, (and from 
 which he picks out thirty-six words only, and dares not quote 
 any sentence in which they exist) , because Professor Fiske was 
 not present to hear that discussion at Detroit, and was dead 
 before the volume of Tranactions for that year was printed, so 
 that he never either heard or read one sentence of this to which 
 our candid (?) author applies Professor Fiske's criticism, nor 
 is there the least reason to suppose that Professor Fiske would 
 have criticised my style in that discussion as too vehement, since 
 it was entirely acceptable to the Publication Committee of the 
 American Historical Association, without whose approval it 
 could not have been printed in the Transactions. 
 
 I wrote Professor Fiske immediately on receipt of his letter, 
 thanking him for his kindly criticism, but explaining to him 
 that the MSS. sent him were not intended for publication 
 without careful revision, but that they were criticisms, copies 
 of which had been sent directly to the authors of the school 
 histories criticised, and that I had made some of them ex- 
 tremely sarcastic, because the parties criticised had been ex- 
 ceedingly discourteous to me when, some years before, I had 
 written them very courteous letters warning them (some of 
 them before their books were published) of the wholly fictitious 
 nature of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, and imploring 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 51 
 
 them to investigate the original sources before imposing such 
 a fiction on the school children of the country as history, and 
 assuring them that, if they put it in, they would speedily be 
 obliged to cut it out, as its falsity would be proved beyond any 
 question, and offering to put before them without charge (in 
 confidence, for their own use only,) all the evidence in my 
 possession, (which had cost me $10,000 in money and time to 
 collect,) to enable them to arrive at the truth about the matter. 
 
 On page 8 our candid author says "He" (i. e., M. Eells) 
 "prefers to follow the advice of Professor Fiske to Professor 
 Marshall, 'It seems to me that there is great value in a quiet 
 form of statement, even approaching to an understatement, for 
 it gives the reader a chance to do a little swearing at the enemy 
 on his own account.' " 
 
 Had Mr. Eells either printed the whole of Dr. Fiske's letter, 
 or had said, "Was it strange that in a letter heartily endorsing 
 the correctness of Mr. Marshall's conclusions Dr. Fiske also 
 wrote him, 'I think the force of your arguments,' etc., he might 
 have commented as much as he pleased on these two sentences 
 in it, and I would not have cared to waste one moment in notic- 
 ing his comments. But from a letter more warmly commenda- 
 tory of the value and the thoroughness of my work on the his- 
 tory of Oregon than I would have written myself, had Dr. 
 Fiske told me to write anything I pleased and he would sign it, 
 to take out these fragments of two sentences of kindly criticism, 
 not of the correctness of my statements, but of their style, and 
 to apply them to an article which Dr. Fiske never saw, and so 
 convey to all the readers of this "Reply" the impression that 
 Dr. Fiske's letter was condemnatory instead of very warmly 
 commendatory of my work, illustrates the idea of "candor" 
 and "fairness" which has animated not Mr. Eells alone, but 
 every one else who has published a book advocating the Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon story ; which is my only reason for this full 
 exposition of the matter. 
 
 HIS CANDOR ( ?) IN THE MATTER OF REV. H. H. SPALDING'S 
 
 DIARY. 
 
 Another excellent illustration of his idea of "candor" is in 
 his treatment of the diary of Rev. H. H. Spalding. From this 
 diary, which has been in Rev. M. Eells' possession for many 
 years, he has only published sixty-one words (on p. 18 of his 
 pamphlet, Marcus Whitman, M. D.), and those sixty-one words 
 not till 1883, i. e., eighteen years after the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story was first published in full by Spalding. Having 
 repeatedly called on the advocates of the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story, and particularly Rev. M. Eells, to make this 
 diary accessible to historical students, on January 13, 1902, I 
 
52 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 wrote to Rev. M. Eells asking him to either print that diary 
 or turn it over, unmutilated, to the Oregon Historical Society. 
 To that letter I received no answer, but on pages 19 and 20 of 
 this "Reply," after quoting that request from me, he says that 
 some years since he did "Copy by hand and turn over to Pro- 
 fessor F. G. Young, Secretary of the Oregon Historical So- 
 ciety" (not that diary unmutilated, but) "all that was of public 
 interest in this diary" — he being the only judge of what was of 
 public interest^-and that "The diary does not include the time 
 under discussion," but covers and "Is quite full from Novem- 
 ber, 1838, to April 22, 1842," and has a page and a half cover- 
 ing "February 21 to March 7, 1843," an d tnen sa .Y s > "The 
 reader can judge from this on what little evidence and knowl- 
 edge the professor (i. e., myself) bases some of his statements." 
 What I had claimed was, that "That diary must contain a good 
 deal of matter that would be very important in the discussion 
 of the Whitman question." Our candid author seeks first to 
 hedge by claiming that "it does not cover the time under dis- 
 cussion (that is September, 1842, to October, 1843), as H >t 
 would be possible to properly discuss the Whitman question 
 without covering the whole time that the Whitman^Spalding 
 Mission existed, i. e., 1836 to 1848, but he is careful not to 
 quote another word out of the something more than 25,000 in 
 the diary, except the sixty-one before mentioned. 
 
 Determined to know what was in this so carefully concealed 
 original source of Oregon history, in July, 1902, I went 
 from Chicago to Portland, Ore., mainly to see this 
 part of it which M. Eells claims to have turned over 
 to the Oregon Historical Society, and if that should 
 not seem to me a proper selection from it, to go to 
 Mr. Eells' home and ask to see the diary itself. Finding 
 that the Assistant Secretary and Librarian of the Oregon His- 
 torical society in Portland knew nothing of any extracts from 
 Spalding's Diary having ever been given into the custody of 
 the Society, I went to Skokomish, and at Mr. Eells' house ex- 
 amined and copied some 11,000 words from it, and found in it, 
 exactly as I expected, a great deal of matter which is of much 
 importance to a thorough understanding of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon question, but not a single word in it which fur- 
 nishes the least support to any version of the Saving Oregon 
 theory of Whitman's ride, or to any claim of great patriotism, or 
 farsightedness, or intellectual or moral greatness in Marcus 
 Whitman's character or achievements. As it is evident that 
 no advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story will ever 
 have any desire to publish any considerable part of this diary, 
 any more than to publish the correspondence of the Oregon Mis- 
 sion with the American Board, it appears likely that the public 
 will have to wait for several pages of it in my forthcoming book 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 53 
 
 on "The Acquisition of Oregon and the Long-Suppressed Evi- 
 dence About Marcus Whitman," in which I shall try 
 to publish some 150 to 200 pages of this evidence which has 
 been so carefully concealed hitherto, except as my MSS. and 
 later Professor Bourne's ''Legend of Marcus Whitman" have 
 made a little of it known. 
 
 REV. DR. EELLS' HAZY NOTIONS OF "SCIENTIFIC" AND "TRUTH- 
 FUL." HISTORY. 
 
 Pages 35 to 44 of Mr. Eells' "Reply" contain a very foggy 
 discussion of "scientific history" vs. "true history," exhibiting 
 his total lack alike of the scientific spirit and of logic and of 
 the laws of evidence and of any sense of humor. On page 37 
 he triumphantly asks, "In fact, can Professor Bourne tell what 
 contemporary writer recorded the history of Christ, all the 
 gospels having been written many years after Christ's death ?" 
 Now, in spite of the persistent efforts for more than twenty 
 years past of the authors and advocates of the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story — and especially Rev. M. Eells — to exalt it into an 
 additional article of religious and patriotic faith by seeking to 
 show that the evidence in support of it is as strong as, and no 
 more contradictory than, that offered in support of the trust- 
 worthiness of the New Testament, even he must know that 
 there is not the remotest parallelism between the two cases. 
 Suppose now that Matthew and Mark and Luke and John had 
 been employed by some great society during the public life of 
 Christ, and for some years after his death, and that they had not 
 only written several hundred letters to that society, but also 
 several score of letters to relations and friends, the whole, with 
 fragments of their diaries aggregating more than a million 
 words, and that these letters to the society were now found to 
 be in existence, all securely bound up and indexed, and also 
 the official action of the society on these letters and the replies 
 to them of its Corresponding Secretary, were found to be in ex- 
 istence, and that many of the letters to their friends, togethei 
 with fragments of their diaries were also found to be in ex* 
 istence, and that there were also found to be in existence many 
 contemporaneous documents of the Roman Government of un- 
 doubted authenticity, and that in all this vast mass of con- 
 temporaneous documents of the authors of the gospels not only 
 was there not a single sentence found expressing the slightest 
 interest in or concern about the life or crucifixion of Jesus, but 
 also in the government documents there was conclusive evidence 
 that Jesus was not crucified at all, how much credence does 
 Mr. Eells suppose would be given to the gospels "written many 
 years after the event?" And what confidence would anyone 
 have in the ability as a historian of any clergyman (even if, as 
 
d 
 
 54 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 in the case of Rev. M. Eells, he had been made a D. D. by 
 Whitman College), who, knowing of all this vast mass of con- 
 temporaneous evidence of undoubted authenticity, should for 
 years suppress all mention of it, and ask people to believe in- 
 stead of it "the gospel narrative written many years after the 
 event?" This is precisely the case with the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story. The correspondence of Whitman and his as- 
 sociates with the American Board and with friends and rela- 
 tives, and the known fragments of their diaries prior to Whit- 
 man's starting to return to Oregon in April, 1843, a gg re g a t e 
 fully 600,000 words, and in it all is not so much as one short 
 sentence expressing the slightest interest in or concern about 
 the political destiny of any part of the Oregon Territory, or giv- 
 ing the least support in any way to any version of a patriotic 
 origin or purpose of Whitman's ride. Yet Mr. Eells, with all 
 his pretensions of candor and desire to have the truth about 
 Whitman's life made manifest, in the sixty thousand or more 
 words of this "Reply" does not find space to quote so much as 
 one sentence out of all this correspondence and these diaries 
 of Whitman and his associates prior to his return to Oregon. 
 Of letters and diaries of Whitman and his associates of dates 
 subsequent to April, 1843, an d down to the first appearance of 
 the first vague version of the Whitman Saved Oregon story in 
 the Sacramento Union of November 16, 1864, there exist fully 
 450,000 to 500,000 words more, including fully 26,000 to 28,000 
 words in letters to the Secretary of the American Board from 
 Dr. Whitman himself of dates between November, 1843, an( l 
 October 18, 1847. 
 
 In the contemporaneous Government documents there is, as 
 we have already seen (pp. 23-35 an te) the most indisputable evi- 
 dence that there was no danger of losing Oregon in the spring 
 of 1843 and that Whitman did not influence the policy of 
 Tyler's Administration. 
 
 We have already shown (pp. 20-21 ante) how the expenses of 
 his journey and his frigid reception by the Secretary of the Amer- 
 ican Board, in Boston, combined with the steadily and rapidly 
 increasing decadence of the Mission subjected Whitman to a 
 great temptation to magnify the importance of his ride, so as 
 to convince the American Board that in some way such good 
 had resulted from it as to justify its expense, and the resulting 
 expense in continuing the Mission, which, but for that ride, 
 must have been destroyed in 1843, or > at latest, 1844; and we 
 have also seen that neither Dr. Whitman nor his wife, in any 
 letters ever written by them, made any claim that he had com- 
 municated any information to President Tyler, or Secretary 
 Webster, or that he had had any interviews with either of 
 them, or had received any promises of assistance from them, 
 or from any other Government official, or that he had found 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 55 
 
 any negotiations pending about Oregon which were to be in 
 any manner affected by anything he had done or might do, 
 or that he had published in newspapers — much less in a 
 pamphlet — any information about Oregon while in the East, 
 or held any public meetings to promote migration to Oregon, 
 and that in but one letter, that of April i, 1847, f° ur ^d one- 
 half years after he started for the States, did he claim that 
 anything else but missionary business induced him to make his 
 ride. 
 
 We have also seen how Dr. Mowry copies Rev. Dr. Thomas 
 Laurie's deceptive quotation from that letter instead of going 
 to the letter itself, and (p. 22 ante) I have for the first time given 
 the public a chance to read exactly what claim Whitman did 
 make in that letter. In my forthcoming book is a chapter on 
 "What Dr. Whitman himself claimed about his services to the 
 Government," in which every sentence in which he makes any 
 claim is quoted exactly as it was written, and compared with 
 the unquestionable facts, so that the public can judge for itself 
 as to what value to attach to his own claims, as well as to the 
 claims made for him by Gray, Spalding, C. Eells, M. Eells, 
 Barrows, Nixon, Craighead, Mowry, et al. 
 
 As soon as I read, in February, 1887, Rev. Dr. Laurie's 
 garbled quotation from Whitman's letter of April 1, 1847, i n 
 the Missionary Herald, for September, 1885, it seemed to me 
 so palpably dishonest, that I wrote to Dr. Laurie asking him 
 where I could see the original letter. He replied that he pre- 
 sumed I could see it at the American Board rooms in Boston, 
 where he had. 
 
 This much surprised me, for ten years before, in answer to 
 my thrice repeated inquiry of an official of the American Board 
 at different meetings with him, I had been assured that there 
 were no letters in their archives which showed the purpose of 
 Whitman's ride. I applied to the American Board for permis- 
 sion to examine the correspondence of the Oregon Mission, 
 and on permission being given was amazed to find the immense 
 amount hereinbefore mentioned. 
 
 ■ 
 
 JOINT LETTERS OF REV C. EELLS AND REV. E. WALKER, DATED OCT. 
 
 3, 1842, FOR WHICH WHITMAN DID NOT WAIT AS HE 
 
 HAD AGREED TO DO. 
 
 Within an hour I had found not only this letter of April 1, 
 1847, but also the 14-page letter written by C. Eells, and en- 
 dorsed by E. Walker in a brief note as correct, which contained 
 the official report of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Ore- 
 gon Mission, May 16-June 8, 1842, and also the report of the 
 Special Meeting Sept. 26-27, 1842, each report signed E. 
 Walker, Moderator, Cushing Eells, Scribe; also E. Walker's 
 
56 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (/) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 1 6-page letter to which Gushing Eells had appended a note, 
 stating that the subjects of the letter had been frequently dis- 
 cussed between Mr. Walker and himself, and its general plan 
 mutually agreed upon, and that having heard all of it read once 
 and parts of it more than once, ''I have observed nothing of 
 importance to which I cannot give a full assent." The en- 
 dorsement by each of the other's letter made these in reality 
 joint letters. Each was begun Oct. 3, 1842, and Walker's Jour- 
 nal — (perfectly well known to M. Eells for at least 18 years 
 past) — states that his letter was not finished till October 8th, 
 and Mrs. Whitman's letter, dated Oct. 17, 1842, (published in 
 Trans. Or. Pi. Asscn., 1891, p. 167) explicitly declares that 
 the letters from Messrs. Eells and Walker had only arrived 
 that day, when Dr. Whitman had been gone two weeks. Rev. 
 E. Walker's letter to D. Greene, Secretary, dated Feb. 28, 1843, 
 complains bitterly that though they had sent their letters at 
 the time agreed upon, Dr. Whitman had left before they ar- 
 rived at Wailatpu, and so had gone without the letters from 
 them which he had agreed to wait for; and Walker's Journal, 
 under date of Nov. 1, 1842, reads . . . "We were writing 
 when the Indians came up with letters. We learnt that Dr. 
 W. left on the third of October for the States, without any let- 
 ters from us." Yet in face of this contemporaneous evidence, 
 all perfectly well known to him, Rev. M. Eells, in the Ore- 
 gonian, of Jan. 11, 1885, declared that Rev. C. Eells told him 
 that "Their courier reached Walla Walla" seasonably, "before 
 the 3d/' while in this "Reply," p. 68, he says, "He (*. e., Whit- 
 man) "left his station October 3d, when the fifth was the day he 
 told Messrs. Walker and Eells that he would go. Letters were 
 to be prepared and forwarded accordingly. They reached his 
 station Oct. 5th, but he was gone. One of these letters is now 
 in the possession of the writer. It is a long, strong plea for 
 the continuance of the Southern stations of the Mission. Why 
 did he leave that letter (written by the Moderator of the meet- 
 ing and endorsed by its clerk), which would have been of great 
 help to him, if his main object had been to secure the rescind- 
 ing of the above mentioned order?" But not one word 'of 
 this 16-page letter of E. Walker, endorsed by C. Eells, and 
 dated Ck:tober 3, but not finished till Oct. 8, 1842, does M. 
 Eells in his search for "truth wherever found" quote for the 
 benefit of his readers, nor does he give its date, which would 
 be enough of itself to disprove his assertion in 1885 that it 
 arrived at Wailatpu (165 miles from Eells' and Walker's sta- 
 tion), on October 3, as well as his assertion in the above quoted 
 paragraph that it reached Whitman's station on October 5th. 
 It is also certain from Walker's letter of Feb. 28, 1843, an d 
 from his Journal of Nov. 1, 1842, and from Mrs. Whitman's 
 letter of Oct. 17, 1842, that instead of October 5th being the 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 57 
 
 day agreed upon as C. Eells declared 35 and 41 years after- 
 wards in his various "statements" (wholly unsupported by any 
 contemporaneous letters or other written documents), it was 
 a date not earlier than October 17th that was agreed upon. 
 This letter of Oct. 3-8, 1842 (written by Walker and endorsed 
 by Eells), and of which a duplicate was received by the Secre- 
 tary of the American Board on May 3, 1843, not on ^y contained 
 "a long and strong plea for the continuance of the mission," 
 but a positive statement that to carry out the order of the Board 
 issued in February, 1842, ordering the discontinuance of the 
 Southern branch of the Mission (i. e., three of its four stations) 
 and recalling Spalding and Gray to the States meant the de- 
 struction of the Mission, and also a positive statement that 
 Whitman's going to the States, instead of being discussed for 
 part of two days (as Rev. C. Eells asserted in his 1883 affi- 
 davit), on a political mission was not even proposed by him 
 till just as the others were about to start home (on the morning 
 of September 28th), which was after the record of the Special 
 Meeting had been made up and signed. This is fully con- 
 firmed by Walker's Journal, which states under date of Sep- 
 tember 28, 1842, that it was at breakfast on that morning 
 that Dr. Whitman "let out his plan" to go to the States. But 
 there is not the least intimation either in the official report of the 
 meeting, or in Walker's letter endorsed by C. Eells, or in 
 Walker's Journal, or in any subsequent letter or diary of 
 Walker, or C. Eells, or H. H. Spalding, or W. H. Gray prior 
 to Spalding's articles in the Pacific in October and November, 
 1865, and in the cases of Gray and C. Eells prior to 1866, that 
 anything but the business of the Mission was discussed at that 
 Special Meeting of September 26-27, 1842, while from 
 Walker's pen not a sentence has ever been produced which 
 furnishes the least support to any version of the story that the 
 political destinies of Oregon were even mentioned at that Spe- 
 cial Meeting, or that Whitman's ride had any political purpose 
 or accomplished any political result. Having hastily discussed 
 his going on the morning of the 28th, without again convening 
 the Special Meeting, they passed two "Resolves," but did not 
 put them into the record of the Special Meeting either as an 
 Appendix, or otherwise, so that as far as appears by its report, 
 signed by E. Walker, Moderator, and Cushing Eells, Scribe, 
 Whitman's going to the States for any purpose was not even 
 mentioned in the Special Meeting. One of these two "Resolu- 
 tions" of September 28, 1842, approved of W. H. Gray's with- 
 drawing from the Mission (though the last sentence but 
 one in the official report of the Special Meeting states that 
 they had refused to pass a similar resolution that Gray had 
 offered on the 26th.) 
 
 The second of these resolutions (quoted verbatim on p. 13 
 ante) was 
 
58 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 THE ONLY DOCUMENT THAT WHITMAN TOOK TO THE AMERICAN 
 
 BOARD FROM THE THREE MEN WHO REMAINED ASSOCIATED 
 
 WITH HIM IN THE MISSION. 
 
 This Resolve authorized Whitman "to visit the United States 
 as soon as practicable to confer with the Committee of the 
 A. B. C. F. M. in regard to the interests of this Mission," and 
 was signed by E. Walker, Moderator, Cushing Eells, Scribe, 
 and H. H. Spalding, while Gray unquestionably knew all about 
 this document. Yet when, in 1865-6, Spalding, Gray and C. 
 Eells published their varying versions of the Whitman Saved 
 Oregon story, each of them declared that Whitman's sole pur- 
 pose in making that ride was the patriotic desire to save Oregon 
 to the United States, and never in any of their subsequent 
 "statements" on the subject did any one of them give the least 
 intimation that there was anything in the condition of the Mis- 
 sion to impel him to make that ride, nor did any one of them 
 admit that he had ever heard of the order to discontinue the 
 Southern branch of the Mission (i. e.,. Kamiah, Rev. A. B. 
 Smith's station, who had left the Mission in 1841, though that 
 was not known to the Committee of the A. B. C. F. M. when 
 they issued this order in February, 1842), Lapwai, Rev. H. H. 
 Spalding's station, and Wailatpu, Dr. Whitman's station, leav- 
 ing to be continued only Tshimakain, Rev. C. Eells' and E. 
 Walker's station, and recalling Gray and Spalding (i. e., two 
 out of the five men remaining connected with the Mission) 
 tc the States. Though Rev. M. Eells knows all about this or- 
 der, and knows that nothing but this order and Gray's deser- 
 tion of the Mission are mentioned in the official report of the 
 Special Meeting (contained in his father's 14-page letter, dated 
 October 3, 1842, endorsed as correct by Walker) as having 
 been discussed at that meeting, he has never in all his volum- 
 inous writings quoted the order, nor quoted one word from 
 his father's 14-page letter of October 3, 1842, nor from 
 Walker's 16-page letter of October 3, 1842,, endorsed as correct 
 by his father (which he admits he has in his possession (Cf. 
 Reply p. 68), nor ever quoted the above "Resolve" of Septem- 
 ber 28, authorizing Whitman to go to the States, not to save 
 Oregon, but to save the Mission. Duplicates of these letters 
 were sent to the American Board via the Sandwich Islands, 
 for fear that Dr. Whitman might not get through, and were 
 received at the American Board rooms on May 3, 1843, as tne 
 endorsement of D. Greene, Secretary, on them shows. 
 
 With this exposition of the deep devotion to truth which Rev. 
 M. Eells has displayed in suppressing every word of the 
 correspondence of all the members of the Oregon Mission 
 with the American Board prior to Whitman's ride, though 
 that correspondence, submitted by me in manuscripts, has con- 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TR&TH. 59 
 
 vinced not only every historian that has had the opportunity 
 to read even one-quarter part of them, but also everybody 
 making the least pretension to being a historian — always ex- 
 cepting W. A. Mowry — that it demonstrates the total falsity 
 of the whole Whitman Saved Oregon story, let us see now 
 how he treats the only letter of Whitman's that has ever 
 been found which claims that anything but missionary busi- 
 ness influenced him to make that ride, for although in 
 several other letters Whitman makes most extravagant 
 and unwarranted claims that great good had resulted from 
 the ride, and from the establishment and continuance 
 of his Mission, there has never been found any other 
 letter but this of April I, 1847, m which he makes any claim 
 that his ride had any other purpose than the business of the 
 Mission. How does Rev. M. Eells, trying "To get as near 
 the truth as possible," treat this, the only letter of Whitman's 
 which claims that anything in addition to missionary business 
 induced him to make that ride? He quotes from it. five times 
 (pp. 41, 66, 69, 77 and 118), but though he three times (pp. 
 41, 66 and 118) quotes the first sentence from Rev. Thomas 
 Laurie's inaccurate quotation, he nowhere quotes what 
 Whitman wrote about any other object in his making the ride 
 except to lead out a migration, and nowhere from beginning 
 to end of his book does he even intimate that the Mission 
 would have been "broken up just then" if Whitman had not 
 made his ride. Not only that, but, although Whitman himself 
 positively declared in this letter that it would have been broken 
 up just then if he had not made his ride, our "candid and 
 truth-seeking" author (Reply p. 69) assures his readers that 
 "His station would have been certainly continued had he waited 
 until Spring to go." 
 
 SIX PEOPLE KNEW OF THEIR OWN KNOWLEDGE THE ORIGIN AND 
 PURPOSE OF WHITMAN'S RIDE. 
 
 Six people knew exactly the origin and purpose of Whitman's 
 ride, viz., Rev. C. Eells, Rev. E. Walker, Rev. H. H. Spalding, 
 Mr. W. H. Gray, and Dr. and Mrs. Whitman and we have seen 
 how our candid and truth-seeking author has juggled with the 
 strictly contemporaneous letter of his father, endorsed by E. 
 Walker (to which he never alludes, though knowing that it 
 contains the official report of that meeting of the Mission held 
 September 26-27, 1842, which only discussed the business of 
 the Mission, and not the political destiny of Oregon), and the 
 letter of Walker endorsed by his father in which there is no 
 hint of anything but missionary business, and the "Resolve" 
 of September 28, 1842, signed by C. Eells, E. Walker and H. 
 H. Spalding, which authorized Whitman to go to the States 
 
60 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 "To confer with the Committee of the A. B. C. F. M. in regard 
 to the interests of this Mission," and with not the least intima- 
 tion that he was to go for any other purpose. For these (which 
 the few great historians who have had a chance to read them 
 all in my MSS. agree are conclusive evidence that missionary 
 business, and not patriotism, impelled him to make his ride), 
 our author substitutes his father's alleged "recollections" from 
 1866 to 1882, though those "recollections" are not only wholly 
 unsupported by a single sentence of contemporaneous written 
 or printed evidence, but on all points on which we can compare 
 them with contemporaneous written documents are proved be- 
 yond any doubt to be wholly incorrect. Let us see how our 
 truth-seeking author treats the evidence of the others. 
 
 THE SPALDING-GRAY VERSION OF THE ORIGIN OF WHITMAN^ 
 RIDE TOTALLY REPUDIATED BY REV. M. EELLS. 
 
 We have already seen (pp. 40-42 ante) that Dr. Mowry, while 
 using a great amount of what Gray and Spalding after 1864-66 
 "recollected" — or imagined — about Whitman's ride, and en- 
 dorsing them as good, truthful men whose "recollections" may 
 safely be depended upon as to the place Whitman should oc- 
 cupy in the history of Oregon, himself totally rejects all that 
 they wrote about Whitman's ride, which was a matter of their 
 own personal knowledge and experience, to-wit, its origin, by 
 not even alluding to the Spalding-Gray version of the great 
 dinner at Walla Walla, and the taunt anent the announcement 
 of the speedy arrival of the Red River settlers, etc., nor to their 
 "recollection" that to save Oregon was the "sole purpose" of 
 his ride, nor to their equally positive "recollection" that Whit- 
 man barely succeeded in preventing the trading off of Oregon 
 fcl the Ashburton treaty for a codfishery on the banks of New- 
 foundland. 
 
 Rev. M. Eells in like manner calmly repudiates all of these 
 "recollections" of Gray and Spalding, (since they have been 
 proved beyond any dispute to be totally false,) but still, like 
 Dr. Mowry, quotes extensively from them to support other 
 parts of the Saving Oregon story, and, carefully suppressing 
 their contemporary letters and diaries, with those of his father 
 and Rev. E. Walker, which demonstrate beyond any doubt 
 the falsity of the whole Whitman Saved Oregon story, he 
 imposes upon the credulity of his readers as trustworthy his- 
 tory what Gray and Spalding "recollected*" about what Whit- 
 man said and did in Missouri and in Washington, from 2,000 
 tc 3,000 miles away from them ! 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (/) FOR TRUTH. 61 
 
 MR. EELLS' TREATMENT OF THE FIVE LETTERS OF MRS WHITMAN, 
 
 WHICH STATE THAT HIS RIDE WAS ON THE BUSINESS 
 
 OF THE MISSION. 
 
 We have seen (on pp. 16-18 ante) that Mrs. Whitman on Sep- 
 tember 29 and 30, 1842, wrote two letters in which she explicitly 
 declared that her husband was going to make his ride on the 
 business of the Mission, and on March 11, April 14 and May 
 18, 1843, wrote three more letters, in each of which it was 
 necessarily implied that his ride was on the business of the 
 Mission, and we have seen how Dr. Mowry juggles with these, 
 the only letters in which she ever wrote anything concerning 
 the purpose of his ride. Rev. M. Eells knows perfectly well 
 about all these letters. 
 
 How does our candid author "seeking for the truth of history 
 wherever found" treat these letters? He does not quote a 
 word from them, nor in any way refer to them in such a way 
 that his readers can learn anything about where to look for 
 them, or obtain any other information of their contents than 
 is contained in the following (Reply, p. 35), "He" (i. e., Prof. 
 Bourne) can find from her letters that before the Doctor started 
 East he intended to go to Washington." 
 
 MR. EELLS' TREATMENT OF THE FIRST TWO ACCOUNTS EVER 
 
 PRINTED OF THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF WHITMAN^ RIDE 
 
 IN THE MISSIONARY HERALD, SEPTEMBER, 1843, 
 
 AND JULY, 1848. 
 
 The only remaining "original sources" or contemporaneous 
 accounts of the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride are the 
 two official accounts in the Missionary Herald, and (on pp. 18- 
 20 ante) they have been quoted and the failure of Dr. Mowry 
 and every other advocate of the Saving Oregon story to quote 
 them has been stated. 
 
 How does our "candid" author, in his earnest search for 
 "the truth of history wherever found" deal with these strictly 
 contemporaneous accounts of the origin and purpose of Whit- 
 man's ride, and the only accounts of that origin and purpose 
 ever printed till the Saving Oregon theory of it was published 
 in 1864-66, remembering that both these accounts distinctly 
 declare that the ride was on the business of the Mission? To 
 the second account he does not allude in this "Reply," nor in 
 any of the numerous articles he has written in defense of the 
 Whitman Legend, and from the first he only quotes two words, 
 as follows: (Reply, p. 41), (writing of the Special Meeting 
 which authorized Whitman's ride). "In Miss. Herald for 
 September, 1843, '* was stated by the editor that such a meeting 
 
6a REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 was held, but he said that it was 'last October.' This was scien- 
 tific, but it was not the truth." 
 
 Our truth seeking author quotes nothing more of this, the first 
 account ever printed as to the origin and purpose of Whit- 
 man's ride, from title page to finis of this "Reply," except this 
 quibble over the petty mistake of the editor in writing "last 
 October," when, as a fact, the meeting was held September 
 26 and 27. Mr. Eells' statement that this trivial error "was 
 scientific" is nonsense. Scientific history, according to his own 
 inaccurate definition of it (Reply, p. 37), is "The facts written 
 at or near the time they occurred," and "last October" was 
 not "a fact" but a blunder of the editor of the Missionary Her- 
 ald, doubtless due to the fact that both C. Eells' letter and E. 
 Walker's letter were dated October 3, 1842. But C. Eells' 
 was the "Scribe" of that meeting and his letter begins its offi- 
 cial record as follows: "A Special Meeting of the Oregon 
 Mission was called on the 26th of September, 1843." I* 1S plain, 
 therefore, that the editor of the Missionary Herald did not 
 refer to that official record for the date, but assumed that be- 
 cause the two letters were dated October 3, 1842, that the 
 meeting was held "last October." Scientific history is history 
 honestly, carefully and accurately written by candid and com- 
 petent persons, from the very best authorities obtainable, 
 which means, always from the original sources when they 
 exist and are accessible. As the official record of that meeting, 
 stating that it was called to order September 26, and closed 
 September 2y, 1842, was in the office of the Secretary of the 
 American Board, it was not "scientific" for him, instead of re- 
 ferring to it and giving the correct date, to write "last Octo- 
 ber." On p. 42 we have another illustration of the muddled 
 condition of Mr. Eells' mind on this question of scientific his- 
 tory. He states that a pamphlet about Mason County, Wash- 
 ington, was published in July, 1901, for distribution at the 
 Buffalo Pan American exposition, "which hence would be be- 
 lieved to be authentic," and that it stated that Martin Koop- 
 man "conducted a restaurant at Hoodsport," and Mr. Eells 
 continues, "Now this is scientific because its author went there 
 before he wrote it, took four pictures of the place for his 
 pamphlet, and was supposed to know. But the truth is that 
 Mr. Koopman does not and never has kept a restaurant there, 
 but a saloon." That is, according to Mr. Eells' ideas of scien- 
 tific history, every man who dashes off an advertising pamphlet 
 for gratuitous distribution, no matter how careless, or dis- 
 honest, or indifferent to truth he may be, is a writer of "scien- 
 tific history," if, perchance, he has visited the locality of which 
 he writes, and taken some pictures of it ! 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 63 
 
 THE POSITION OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT ON THE OREGON 
 
 BOUNDARY. 
 
 Let us turn now to official documents showing the position 
 of our Government as to Oregon. In 1826, eight years before 
 any missionary went to Oregon, and ten years before Whitman 
 established his Mission there, President J. Q. Adams instructed 
 Henry Clay, Secretary of State, to direct Gallatin, our Minister 
 at London, to notify the British Government that "49 degrees 
 was our ultimatum for the northern boundary of Oregon," and 
 with slight variations in phraseology these instructions were sent 
 in three letters, dated June 19, June 23, and August 9, 1826, and 
 that of June 23 is sufficient of itself to wipe away all the ridicu- 
 lous assertions made about our Government having been misled 
 by English misrepresentation about the worthlessness of Ore- 
 gon. It read as follows : "Mr. Crook's information adds but little 
 to what was previously possessed. If the land on the North- 
 west Coast, between the mouth of the Columbia River and the 
 parallel of 49 degrees be bad, and therefore we should lose 
 but little in relinquishing it, the same consideration will apply 
 to the British. The President cannot consent to vary the line 
 proposed in your instructions." (Cf. for these three letters, 
 Clay to Gallatin Am. State Papers For. Relations, Vol. VI., 
 Doc. 458.) No Administration ever proposed to recede from 
 this "ultimatum" of 49 degrees, and in 1838, the Senate by 
 unanimous resolution requested the War Department to pre- 
 pare a map of Oregon, which was accordingly done by the 
 Topographical Bureau of the War Department. 
 
 THE "OFFICIAL ULTIMATUM MAP." 
 
 This map represented 49 degrees to the Pacific as the north- 
 ern boundary of Oregon, and out in the Pacific Ocean, where 
 no rivers or mountain ranges would obscure the printing or 
 divert attention from it, appeared, in plain type, the following : 
 "The prolongation of the 49th parallel from the Rocky Moun- 
 tains to the Pacific has been assumed as the northern boundary 
 of the United States possessions on the Northwest Coast, in 
 consequence of the following extract from the Hon. H. Gay's 
 letter to Mr. Gallatin, dated June 19, 1826 (See Doc. 199, 29th 
 Cong., 1st Sess., H. of R.) : 'You are authorized to propose 
 the annulment of the third article of the Convention of 1818, 
 and the extension of the line on the parallel of 49 degrees from 
 the Eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, where it now ter- 
 inates to the Pacific Ocean, as the permanent boundary be- 
 tween the two powers in that quarter. This is our ultimatum 
 and you may so announce it.' " This "Ultimatum Map" was 
 used in the report of the Com. on Oregon, of which Senator 
 
64 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Linn was Chairman, June 6, 1838, also in Cushing's report to 
 the H. of R. January 4, and his supplemental report February 
 16, 1839, also in the report of the Mil. Com. of the H. of R., 
 commonly known as Pendleton's first report May 27, 1842, 
 also in the second report of that Mil. Com., commonly known 
 as Pendleton's 2nd report January 4, 1843. All these reports 
 were unanimous on the part of the committee, and all were 
 unanimously adopted by the body to which they were made, 
 and of them "in addition to the usual number" 10,000 
 copies of Cushing's, and 5,000 of each of Pendleton's were 
 printed for distribution, so that including "the usual num- 
 ber" of each, there were 26,000 or more copies of this 
 official "Ultimatum Map" printed by direct votes of the 
 Senate and the House between June 6, 1838, and January 
 4, 1843. How was it possible for our government more em- 
 phatically to notify all the world of its inflexible determination 
 to insist on 49 degrees to the coast as the northern boundary of 
 Oregon? Neither M. Eells nor any other advocate of the 
 Saving Oregon theory of Whitman's ride has ever even alluded 
 to these "ultimatum" instructions to Gallatin, nor to this "Ulti- 
 matum Map." 
 
 REV. M. EELLS' TREATMENT OF LIEUT. WILKES' EXPLORATIONS. 
 
 We have already learned (pp. 29-32 ante) of the extent and 
 thoroughness of Lieut. Chas. Wilkes' exploration of the Oregon 
 territory, by land and water, "with a sloop of war, a brig of 
 war, two launches, ten boats and upwards of 300 men" from 
 April 28 to October 10, 1841, and of his very enthusiastic "Spe- 
 cial Rept." on the Oregon territory, filed in the Navy Depart- 
 ment, at Washington, June 13, 1842, and of the ingenious way 
 in which Dr. Mowry, by cribbing a page of my inferences as to 
 why the Administration in 1843 was not willing to have the 
 whole of that "Special Rept." printed, but without quoting a 
 word from that report, or giving his readers any information 
 as to when it was filed in the Navy Department, or anything 
 else which would inform them as to its immense significance 
 in promoting migration to Oregon, and furnishing the gov- 
 ernment full and fresh information in everything of the least 
 importance relating to Oregon aflairs fully nine months 
 before Whitman could have reached Washington, has avoided 
 giving his readers any knowledge which would enable them 
 to judge of the extent, the value and the timeliness of Wilkes' 
 work in exploring and reporting on Oregon. 
 
 Skilful as Dr. Mowry has proved himself in concealing the 
 truth about this important matter, he is thrown completely in 
 the shade by the "candid and truth-seeking" Dr. Eells, who, 
 from title page to finis of his reply (as well as in his pamphlet 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH, 65 
 
 Marcus Whitman, M. D., Portland, Or., 1883.), does not in- 
 form his readers that Wilkes ever saw Oregon at all, but only 
 says of him (Reply, p. 86) : "Commodore Wilkes, in 1841, had 
 praised the harbor of San Francisco as 'one of the finest, if 
 not the very best, harbor in the world !' " 
 
 REV. M. EELLS' TREATMENT OF THE ACTIONS OF TYLER'S ADMIN- 
 ISTRATION RELATING TO OREGON. 
 
 With equal ingenuity he suppresses all the abundant and in- 
 disputable contemporaneous documentary evidence that Tyler's 
 Administration was inflexibly determined to accept of no line 
 south of 49 degrees for the northern boundary of Oregon, and 
 that neither Whitman nor anyone else, in March, or April, 
 1843, or at all y other time during Tyler's term as President, 
 had influenced him to any change of the policy he had about 
 Oregon prior to March, 1843. 
 
 We have heretofore stated (p. 28 ante) that President 
 Tyler's two first annual messages, December, 1841, and De- 
 cember 1842, contained strong paragraphs on Oregon and 
 that Dr. Mowry does not even allude to them. The same is 
 true of Rev. M. Eells. 
 
 We have also (pp. 28-29 an te) learned about Dr. Elijah 
 White's connection with Oregon affairs, and the suppression 
 by Dr. Mowry of everything about Dr. White, except the fact 
 that he arrived at Whitman's mission with a considerable party 
 of settlers early in September, 1842. 
 
 How does the Rev. M. Eells, D. D., "seeking after the truth 
 of history wherever it can be found" treat Dr. White and his 
 work for and in Oregon? 
 
 On page 106 he devotes nearly 200 words to showing why 
 his "witnesses" would not confound Dr. White with Dr. Whit- 
 man, but he carefully refrains everywhere in his writings in 
 defense of the Whitman Saved Oregon Story from any men- 
 tion of the following five things which would be very apt to 
 cause people many years after the event to transfer to Dr. 
 Whitman the deeds and words of Dr. White. 
 
 (1.) That Dr. White as well as Dr. Whitman had been a 
 missionary to the Oregon Indians. 
 
 (2.) That in January and February, 1842, Dr. White un- 
 questionably had interviewed President Tyler, Secretarys Web- 
 ster, Upshur and Spencer, and Senators Linn and Benton. 
 
 (3.) That he had then been directed by the Tyler Adminis- 
 tration to raise a migration to Oregon. 
 
 (4.) That he held public meetings in the spring of 1^42 
 in various cities — Buffalo, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis 
 — to promote a migration to Oregon, and had some newspaper 
 notice thereof. 
 
66 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 (5.) That he organized and was elected leader of the first 
 large overland migration, which left the Missouri frontier 
 May 26, 1842. 
 
 THE ASHBURTON TREATY. BENTON'S OPPOSITION TO IT. WEB- 
 STERNS POSITIVE ASSERTION OF HIS INFLEXIBLE AD- 
 HERENCE TO 49 DEGREES AS THE NORTH LINE 
 OF OREGON, AND REV. M. EELLS' TREAT- 
 MENT OF THIS MATTER. 
 
 We have already seen (pp. 32-34 ante) how carefully Dr. 
 Mowry avoids giving his readers any information about Lord 
 Ashburton's instructions on the Oregon boundary question, 
 and Webster's positive denials January 18 and February 3, 
 1843, that he had made, entertained or meditated accepting 
 the Columbia river, or any other line south of 49 degrees as a 
 negotiable boundary line for the United States. 
 
 It is now more than 16 years since in a letter to Rev. Dr. 
 Eells I called his attention to this twice-repeated denial by 
 Webster on the floor of the Senate, through his lifelong per- 
 sonal and political friend, Rufus Choate, of that indispensable 
 postulate of the Whitman Saved Oregon Story, that Webster 
 and Tyler were indifferent as to the fate of Oregon, and ready 
 to surrender it to England, when Whitman, an utterly un- 
 known man reached the states, and in some mysterious way 
 prevented it, but in all his study of the subject since that time, 
 and all his writings on it he has never apparently found, and 
 certainly has never intimated to his readers that they could 
 find this "authorized" .statement by Webster of his position on 
 the Oregon boundary, in the Congressional Globe, 27 Cong., 
 3d Sess. (pp. 1 71 -2) and its Appendix (pp. 222-9.) 
 
 MR. EELLS' TREATMENT OF THE GREAT DEBATE IN THE SENATE 
 ON LINN'S BILL, IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, 1843. 
 
 We have already in exposing Dr. Mowry's ingenious avoid- 
 ance of giving his readers any information of value about this 
 great debate (Cf. pp. 32-35 ante) shown how vital a full knowl- 
 edge of it is to any understanding of the truth or falsity of 
 the claim that Whitman Saved Oregon, on account of (a.) the 
 great interest the Oregon question excited, as shown by the 
 fact that 2y out of 50 Senators took part in the discussion, 
 including nearly all the leaders of both parties; (b.) the fact 
 that it was stated over and over again in the discussion that 
 the Senate was "unanimously of the opinion that our title to 
 Oregon was incontestable, at least as far north as 49 degrees ;" 
 (c.) the two explicit declarations of Webster, by his friend 
 Choate, hereinbefore quoted, which definitely committed 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 67 
 
 Tyler's Administration to the line of 49 degrees six weeks 
 before Whitman could have reached Washington, and (d.) 
 the fact that an analysis of the vote and a comparison of it 
 with the speeches shows that on February 3, 1843, not merely 
 a bare majority, but certainly one more than two-thirds of the 
 entire Senate were ready to enact any legislation about Ore- 
 gon that we had a right to enact, without first giving the 
 twelve months' notice which was all that was needful to abro- 
 gate the treaty of 1827. 
 
 Our "candid" author searching for "the truth of history 
 wherever it may be found" has absolutely nothing to say about 
 this great debate, except that on page 50 he quotes six lines 
 from the speech of that political nonentity, McDuffie, of South 
 Carolina, but with no intimation that it was the only such fool- 
 ish speech on the Oregon question delivered at that session of 
 Congress. 
 
 MR. EELLS QUOTES TWO FABRICATIONS ALLEGED TO HAVE BEEN 
 UTTERED BY WEBSTER. 
 
 Yet, never having in all his writings intimated that Webster 
 had thus himself, in 1842, in his negotiations with Ashburton, 
 and in these two explicit statements of January 18 and Febru- 
 ary 3, 1843, committed himself and Tyler's Administration ir- 
 revocably to "no line south of 49 degrees as a negotiable boun- 
 dary line for the United States," he devotes 16 pages of this 
 "Reply" (79-95), to an attempt to show that Webster, in 
 March or April, 1843, was ready to part with Oregon because 
 he thought it worthless, when Whitman -(who, as late as April, 
 1846, according to Spalding's letter, edited by Whitman, and 
 published in Palmer's Journal, knew nothing about the only 
 part really in dispute after 1824), arrived in Washington and 
 prevented it. To prove this Mr. Eells quotes one palpable 
 forgery (p. 82), in the extract from a speech which it is al- 
 leged Webster delivered on a proposition- before the Senate in 
 1844, f° r a ma il route from Independence, Mo., to the mouth 
 of the Columbia, beginning, "What do you want of that vast 
 and worthless area?" The internal evidence that Webster 
 never wrote this is irresistible, for, whatever were Webster's 
 failings, he always uttered sensible and dignified English in 
 discussing important public affairs, and the final sentence of 
 this extract as quoted by Gunsaulus in his Introduction to 
 Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," is, "Mr. 
 President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury 
 to place the Pacific Coast one inch nearer to Boston than it is 
 now." When I wrote to Dr. Gunsaulus and asked his authority 
 for this he was obliged to confess that he had none. Finding 
 it in Fields' "Our Western Archipelago," and obtaining from 
 
68 REV. DR. BELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Dr.. Henry M. Field the admission that his only authority for 
 it was a newspaper slip, sent him by Mr. Geo. L. Chase, an 
 insurance man of Hartford, Conn., and being assured by Mr. 
 Chase that he clipped it from a newspaper when traveling 
 on the Pacific Coast, and sent it to Dr. Field, not expecting him 
 to publish it, but merely for his opinion as to its correctness, 
 1 abandoned all further attempt to find who fabricated it. I 
 subsequently found it used by H. H. Bancroft, in "Chronicles 
 of the Builders," Vol. I, pp. 518-19, but as that was not copy- 
 righted till 1890, and as Mr. M. Eells gives as his authority a 
 manuscript written by a Mrs. C. S. Pringle, in December, 
 1884; and as presumably she did not fabricate it, but like Mr. 
 Chase, clipped it from some newspaper, there is no likelihood 
 that its author will ever be known. Not only is its internal 
 evidence sufficient to convince any one with common literary 
 training that Webster never uttered it, but that conviction is 
 rendered a certainty by the fact that Webster was not in the 
 Senate from 1841 to 1845, an d that no such. bill was ever in- 
 troduced in the Senate till March, 1846, and a careful exam- 
 ination of the Cong. Globe shows that upon that bill Webster 
 did not speak at all; and by his great Faneuil Hall (Boston) 
 speech on Oregon in November, 1845, ne na ^ irrevocably com- 
 mitted himself individually, and the Whig party for which he 
 spoke, to the line of 49 degrees to the Pacific. On p. 95 he 
 quotes that other fabrication, which has now been doing duty 
 for 33 years, in support of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, 
 as follows: "In confirmation of this E. D. P., in 1870, wrote 
 that an eminent legal gentleman of Massachusetts, and a per- 
 sonal friend of Mr. Webster, with whom he had several times 
 conversed on the subject, remarked to E. D. P., 'It is safe to 
 assert that our country owes it to Dr. Whitman and his asso- 
 ciate missionaries, that all the territory west of the Rocky 
 Mountains and south as far as the Columbia River is not now 
 owned by England, and held by the Hudson's Bay Company.' " 
 This has heretofore been credited, as it was by Mr. Spalding, 
 who first used it (Cf. p. 23, Sen. Ex. Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3d 
 Sess.) to the "N. Y. Independent, January, 1870." Not Jan- 
 uary 27, as M. Eells says in his footnote, in which also he 
 admits that he does not know in what it appeared, but that 
 "It was found as a scrap of a newspaper, among Mr. Spalding's 
 papers, and is signed E. D. P. or E. D. B. or E. D. R., for the 
 last letter is slightly torn." I have spent considerable time 
 and a little money in searching and having searched the files 
 of newspapers to determine, if possible, where this first ap- 
 peared, but without success, though well aware that if it had 
 appeared in all the newspapers on earth, its doubly anonymous 
 character makes it of not the least evidential value. 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 69 
 
 tyler's tripartite scheme. 
 
 That Tyler had an utterly impracticable scheme in his mind 
 of a tripartite treaty between the United States, Great Britain 
 and Mexico is true, and has been well known since 1885, 
 through Vol. 2, of "Letters and Times of the Tylers," by 
 President L. G. Tyler of William and Mary College, Virginia 
 (who was born in 1852), and who, like Fiske, McMaster, 
 Scudder and others, was imposed upon by Barrows, and so 
 gave the Whitman Saved Oregon 7 story some endorsement, 
 though, as he wrote to me in 1899/he had never seen any con- 
 temporaneous mention of Whitman, either in his father's, 
 papers or those of his half brother, John Tyler, Jr., private 
 secretary to President John Tyler. On reading my Mss. he 
 was straightaway convinced that not only he, but his half 
 brother John, had been imposed upon by Barrows, and that it 
 was Dr. White, and not Dr. Whitman, whom Mr. Reed saw in 
 Washington, and whom John Tyler, Jr., thought he remem- 
 bered, more than forty years afterwards, having seen at the 
 White House. Mr. M. Eells (Reply," p. 94) admits that "Dr. 
 Whitman without doubt never heard of the tripartite plan," 
 but though this inchoate project was, as far as any evidence 
 shows, the only one that any President ever even "dreamed 
 of," as a plan, not for yielding up any part of Oregon south 
 of 49 degrees, but for selling for a good round price that part 
 north and west of the Columbia, Mr. Eells insists that in some 
 mysterious way Whitman prevented that plan, of which he 
 never heard. That President L. G. Tyler has for some time 
 been fully satisfied that the Oregon policy of President John 
 TyleiVwas not controlled by Whitman, and that President 
 Tyler's three letters of December 11 and 18, 1845, an< ^ J an_ 
 uary 1, 1846, show beyond dispute that neither Whitman nor 
 anybody else, either in the Spring of 1843, nor f° r more than 
 two and one-half years thereafter, had modified in the least 
 degree the ideas about the best policy to pursue regarding Ore- 
 gon, which we know, from his other correspondence, that he 
 held in 1842, has been already shown. (Cf. pp. 35-37 ante.) 
 
 It scarcely needs be said that M. Eells, like all the other 
 advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, has never even . 
 alluded to the above mentioned three letters of President Tyler. 
 
 DR. EELLS' UNWARRANTED ATTACK ON HON. ELWOOD EVANS. 
 
 Our candid author assails the honesty and the accuracy of 
 the late Hon. Elwood Evans, a Pacific Coast historical writer 
 of some note, as follows. "Reply" (p. 22) "Elwood Evans, too, 
 properly falls under this criticism." In 1883 Dr. C. Eells had 
 stated in regard to the meeting of the Mission held in Sep- 
 
70 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 tember, 1842, that a record of it was made, but that "the book 
 containing the same was in the keeping of the Whitman family. 
 At the time of their massacre, November 29, 1847, it disap- 
 peared/' The house of Dr. Eells at the Whitman Mission was 
 burned in 1872, a fact which Mr. Evans knew. He had also 
 been furnished with a pamphlet containing the above statement 
 of Dr. Eells. Yet in 1884 he wrote : "In 1866 Rev. Cushing 
 Eells had in his possession the minutes of all the missionary 
 meetings. The assertion that those records were destroyed 
 by fire in 1872 will not be accepted as a satisfactory excuse that 
 between 1865 and 1872 those minutes were not appealed to to 
 settle the question of what transpired at the Mission meeting 
 of 1842." 
 
 It will be noticed that Mr. Evans did not say that "In 1866 
 Rev. Cushing Eells had in his possession the record book 
 containing the reports of all the Mission meetings," but "the 
 minutes" of those meetings, which is quite a different matter, 
 as every one who has had much experience as a Secre- 
 tary can testify. Furthermore, Rev. Myron Eells himself was 
 the authority on whom Elwood Evans depended for those 
 dates, for in a "History of tne Congregational Association of 
 Oregon and Washington," by Rev. Myron Eells, we read that 
 "The proceedings of the meetings of the Missions were either 
 burnt or destroyed at the Whitman massacre in 1847, or at tne 
 time of the fire at Rev. Cushing Eells' in 1872." This was 
 quoted to me by Mr. Evans in a letter dated Tacoma, Wash., 
 August 11, 1882, two and one-quarter years before the date of 
 the article in the Oregonian, from which Rev. M. Eells makes 
 this quotation, which he claims misquotes his father's state- 
 ment about the records of the Mission. Reply (p. 23), he con- 
 tinues, "Mr. Evans wrote that Daniel Webster said in his 
 speech March 30, 1846. "The Government of the United 
 States never offered any line south of 49 degrees (with the 
 navigation of the Columbia) and it never will. It behooves 
 all concerned to regard this as a settled point. I said as plainly 
 as I could speak or put down words in writing, that England 
 must not expect anything south of 49 degrees. I said so in 
 so many words." The first two sentences are in that speech. 
 Afterwards when questioned he added in regard to what he 
 had just told the Senate, not England, in 1842, "the senator 
 and the Senate will do me the justice to admit that I said as 
 plainly as I could and in as short sentence as I could frame 
 that England must not expect anything south of the 49th de- 
 gree," except that there might be friendly negotiations about 
 the navigation of the Columbia, and about certain straits, 
 sounds and islands in the neighboring seas. Mr. Evans's quo- 
 tation is a strange mixture, and the words "put down words 
 in writing" were not then used by Webster." 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. yi 
 
 As usual, Dr. Eells is incorrect in his criticism. He quotes 
 from Webster's Works issued in 185 1-2. But turning to the 
 Cong. Globe, 1st Sess., 29th Cong., March 30, 1846, we find 
 on page 569, 1st column, that, in replying to Senator Allen of 
 Ohio (who had accused him of offering England the river 
 Columbia as the boundary), Webster said precisely what Mr. 
 Evans quoted from him, as follows : "But the gentleman from 
 Ohio and the Senate will do me the justice to allow that 
 I said as plainly as I could speak, or put down words in 
 writing, that England must not expect anything south of 49 
 degrees. I said so in so many words." The first two sentences 
 quoted by Evans are on p. 568 of the Globe of same date, in 
 Webster's reply to Senator J. M. Clayton of Delaware, and are 
 also a verbatin quotation. 
 
 REV. DR. EELLS' WHOLLY UNJUSTIFIABLE ATTACK ON BOTH MR. 
 EVANS AND MYSELF. 
 
 "Reply" (pp. 57-8) : "Prof. Marshall also says in regard to 
 Rev. C. Eells, 'that as late as April, 1865, he denied to Hon. 
 Elwood Evans, the historian of Oregon, any knowledge of any- 
 thing but missionary business, as impelling Whitman to make 
 that ride.' (Trans. Am. Hist. Asscn., 1900, pp. 235-6.) The 
 writer has questioned Prof. Marshall in regard to his authority 
 for this statement, and in his reply the Professor says that 
 Elwood Evans wrote the same to him some seventeen years 
 ago, and that he at or about that time printed the same state- 
 ment in one of his newspaper articles. In reply the writer de- 
 clares that he will not believe this statement until some better 
 proof is given than this : for ( 1 ) the writer has every newspa- 
 per article that he ever heard of that Mr. Evans wrote on the 
 subject, especially between 1881 and 1885, and there is not a 
 hint of such a statement in any of these articles. Dr. Eells was 
 then alive, and the writer does not think Mr. Evans would have 
 dared then to have made the statement. (2) The writer will 
 not accept Mr. Evans' statement on the subject, even if he did 
 make it to Professor Marshall, for as has already been shown, 
 Mr. Evans made Mr. Eells say something in regard to the de- 
 struction of the records of the meeting of September, 1842, 
 which he did not say, and also made Mr. Webster say some- 
 thing he did not say. (See above, p. 23.) The writer calls for 
 the letter, and feels sure that if his father had ever written 
 such a letter he would have heard of it before the year 1902, 
 and also that in newspaper articles which he has by Mr. Evans, 
 when he fully discussed Dr. Eells' evidence, Mr. Evans would 
 have printed this letter." 
 
 But neither Mr. Evans nor I ever claimed that Rev. Cushing 
 Eells wrote this in a letter to either of us, which fact is 
 
72 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 perfectly well known to Rev. M. Eells. It was in a personal 
 interview with Mr. Evans, when he was gathering materials 
 for his history, that Rev. C. Eells disclaimed all knowledge 
 of any patriotic purpose for Whitman's ride, as follows: "I 
 had seen Mr. Eells" (Rev. Cushing Eells) "in 1865. I en- 
 deavored to learn the history of those missionary years; my 
 queries were particularly directed to the two immigrations 
 of 1842-3 ; he was as reticent as if he knew nothing, surely 
 he breathed not this patriotic claim for the little missionary 
 convocation of 1842. True, that was in April, 1865, and 
 Myron Eells has indicated the 'great work was not known 
 or realized till 1866/ and possibly it was still a secret." (Cf. 
 Art. on "Dr. Whitman and Oregon," by Evans, in Daily 
 Oregonian, March 15, 1885. This article was also reprinted 
 in Weekly Oregonian, March 20, 1885.) As we have seen the 
 second reason he assigns for not believing Mr. Evans is abso- 
 lutely false, for Mr. Evans neither made Rev. C. Eells say any- 
 thing which he did not say about the destruction of the records 
 of the mission, nor made Daniel Webster in the United States 
 Senate say anything which he did not say. The first reason is 
 equally false, for not only did Mr. Evans publish this while 
 Rev. C. Eells was living, but published it in the most widely 
 circulated paper published in the old Oregon Territory, four 
 years before Rev. C. Eells died, and Rev. M. Eells not only 
 knew about its publication, but he wrote a long answer to it — 
 (about 9,000 words) — (which was published in the Oregonian 
 of May 21, 1885), and replied, as best he could, to Mr. Evans 
 under fifteen heads — but carefully refrained from even alluding 
 to this, which he could not have failed to see in the article, 
 and which, now that Mr. Evans is dead, he declares Mr. Evans 
 would not have dared to publish while his father was living. 
 My scrap-books, containing both articles, are now lying open 
 before me. Furthermore, that Rev. M. Eells when he wrote this 
 "Reply" had not forgotten about either Mr. Evans' article in 
 Daily Oregonian of March 15, 1885, and Weekly of March 20, 
 1885, nor his reply to it in Oregonian of May 21, 1885, is cer- 
 tain, for in his "Reply," on pages 7, 23 and 45, he quotes from, 
 and in a footnote refers to, the article of March 20, 1885, and 
 on pages 7 and 18 also quotes from, and by footnote refers to, 
 his own article of May 21, 1885, and on pages 100-103 he uses 
 fifty lines — say, about 550 words — from his article of May 21, 
 1885, but without stating whence he makes the quotation. 
 
 MR. EELLS" DISINGENUOUS STATEMENT ABOUT REV. E. WALKER. 
 
 An excellent example of the curious notions about "candor" 
 which Rev. M. Eells has acquired in his long residence about 
 Indian agencies is found in a footnote (on p. 59), concerning 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 73 
 
 the reason why no evidence has ever been produced from Rev. 
 E. Walker giving the least support to any form of the Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon story, as follows: "Mr. Walker died in 
 1877, before this controversy arose. Hence his testimony was 
 not obtained." Could anything more disingenuous be imagined 
 than this? Eighteen seventy-seven was twelve years after the 
 Saving Oregon story was first printed in full by Spalding, and 
 eleven years after Rev. C. Eells published his entirely different 
 and contradictory version of its origin, and "the controversy" 
 was constantly on after 1865, and "it goes without saying" that 
 the advocates of the story would have been delighted to have 
 secured a statement endorsing either version of it from Walker, 
 or to have used any that he left when he died, in diary or letter. 
 But he was too thoroughly honest a man to make any statement 
 they could use, and his diary and his letters are among the 
 strongest documents, that in the opinion of all real historians 
 who have read them, totally disprove the Saving Oregon theory 
 of Whitman's ride. 
 
 NO ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THE HUDSON^ BAY COMPANY AND 
 THESE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 As he has repeatedly done in his newspaper articles, our 
 "candid" author in "Reply" (pp. 96-7) assigns as the reason 
 why the Whitman Saved Oregon story was not published 
 earlier that the mission was dependent on the Hudson's Bay 
 Company for supplies and that it would not have been prudent 
 to state the real purpose of Whitman's ride, as it "might have 
 so alienated the company that they would have cut off the 
 supplies/' 
 
 This, with much more he has written, is designed to convince 
 the public (which is profoundly ignorant of the valid evidence 
 on this subject) that there was antagonism between the Hud- 
 son's Bay Company and these missionaries, and the same stuff 
 at greater length was written by Edwin Eells (a brother of 
 Myron) to the Sunday School Times, and published in its issue 
 of November 22, 1902. 
 
 «^In my forthcoming "History of the Acquisition of Oregon 
 and the Long-Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman," 
 I shall print scores of pages of the letters and diaries of these 
 missionaries, which will convince every reader that sorrier 
 fictions were never printed than this stuff about antagonism 
 between the Hudson's Bay Company and these missionaries, 
 and that in reality the Hudson's Bay Company treated all these 
 missionaries with the most constant and unbounded kindness 
 during the whole existence of the mission. 
 
 But there is only space here for two items. 
 
 First. No sooner did news of the Whitman massacre reach 
 
74 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH {?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Ft Vancouver than James Douglas and P. S. Ogden fitted out 
 two boats, and with sixteen men and an ample supply of Indian 
 goods, started them under the command of Ogden to Ft. Walla 
 Walla, about 300 miles up the Columbia. Making utmost pos- 
 sible speed, they reached Walla Walla December 19, and Ogden 
 immediately began negotiations for the ransom of the fifty-one 
 captives at Whitman's station, and the nine at Spalding's sta- 
 tion, who were virtually captives, since the Nez Perces would 
 only allow them to leave on payment by Ogden of a ransom, 
 and so vigorously did he prosecute his mission of mercy that 
 January 1, 1848, the sixty ransomed ones were at Walla Walla, 
 and the next day they started down the river, and in due time 
 Mr. Ogden delivered them in safety at Oregon City. 
 
 January 8, 1848, Rev. H. H. Spalding wrote to D. Greene, 
 secretary, a letter giving an account of the massacre and the 
 rescue of the captives, and continued as follows "Too much 
 praise cannot be credited to Mr. Ogden for his timely, prompt 
 and judicious and Christian efforts in our behalf. 
 
 "We owe it under kind heaven to the efforts of Mr. Ogden 
 and Mr. Douglas that we are alive and at this place to-day. 
 
 "May the God of Heaven abundantly reward them." 
 
 The whole history of Indian massacres since the settlement 
 of America began shows no other instance where so many cap- 
 tives were so quickly rescued with no fighting and with no 
 overwhelming military force menacing the Indians. 
 
 The Oregon Spectator, the only paper then published in 
 Oregon, in its issue of January 20, 1848, printed the following 
 letter: 
 
 "Oregon City, 17 Jan., 1848. 
 
 "Sir : I feel it a duty as well as a pleasure to tender you my 
 sincere thanks and the thanks of this community for your ex- 
 ertions in behalf of the widows and orphans that were left in 
 the hands of the Cayuse Indians. 
 
 "Their state was a deplorable one, subject to the caprices of 
 savages, exposed to their insults, compelled to labor for them, 
 and remaining constantly in dread lest they should be butch- 
 ered, as their husbands and fathers had been. 
 
 "From this state I am fully satisfied we could not relieve 
 them. 
 
 "A small party of Americans would have been looked upon 
 by them with contempt; a large party would have been the 
 signal for a general massacre. 
 
 "Your immediate departure from Vancouver on receipt of 
 the intelligence from Wailatpu enabling you to arrive at Walla 
 Walla before the news of the American party having started 
 from this place reached them, together with your influence 
 over the Indians, accomplished the desirable object of relieving 
 the distressed. 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 75 
 
 "Your exertions in behalf of the prisoners will no doubt 
 cause a feeling of pleasure to you through life, but this does 
 not relieve them nor us from obligations we are under to you. 
 
 "You have also laid the American government under obliga- 
 tions to you, for their citizens were the subjects of the massa- 
 cre, and their widows and orphans are the relieved ones. With 
 a sincere prayer that the widows' God and the Father of the 
 Fatherless may reward you for your kindness, I have the honor 
 to remain, sir, Your obedient servant, 
 
 "George Abernethy, 
 "Governor of Oregon Territory. 
 "To Peter Skeen Ogden, Esq., Chief Factor Honorable Hud- 
 son's Bay Company, Vancouver." 
 
 For this expenditure of time and labor and of property paid 
 for the ransom of these American citizens no bill was ever ren- 
 dered by the Hudson's Bay Company, either to the National 
 Government or to that of Oregon, nor was any payment ever 
 made to the Hudson's Bay Company by either government. 
 
 Second. Rev. C. Eells and E. Walker, at their station, 
 165 miles north of Whitman's station, did not hear of the mas- 
 sacre (which began November 29, 1847) till December 9, 1847. 
 
 They straightway sent an express to Fort Colvile, the nearest 
 Hudson's Bay Company's post, sixty miles to the north, and 
 John Lee Lewes, chief factor in charge there, immediately re- 
 plied, urging them, if it should appear that they were in any 
 danger, to "Fly to this establishment without delay, and I will 
 do my best for your protection." March 15, 1848, the situation 
 became so menacing at their station that they went to Colvile, 
 and from that time till June 1, both families, including Myron 
 and Edwin, then very small children, were most hospitably 
 entertained without charge at Fort Colvile. Then a detach- 
 ment from the First Oregon Rifles was sent to escort them to 
 Walla Walla and start them down the river to the American 
 settlements, nearly 400 miles to the southwest. 
 
 On leaving Colvile, Rev. C. Eells wrote in his journal, "With 
 emotions which we could not well express for the great kind- 
 ness and invaluable assistance of John Lee Lewes, Esq., we 
 took leave of that worthy gentleman." (Cf., letter No. 107 
 (22 pages foolscap, in the form of a journal), from Rev. C. 
 Eells to D. Greene, in Vol. 248, Am. Bd. Correspondence.) 
 
 Silly as is all this talk of antagonism between the Hudson's 
 Bay Company and the American Board missionaries, rendering 
 it necessary to conceal the real object of Whitman's ride when 
 written by anybody, in view of its total falsity, its silliness is 
 thrown completely in the shade when written by the Rev. 
 Myron Eells, D.D., or by his brother, Edwin Eells, by the 
 shameless ingratitude of this slanderous fiction about those 
 
76 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH {?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 to whose humanity and kindness the families of Rev. E. Walker 
 and Gushing Eells owed their lives. 
 
 WHITMAN PROBABLY WENT FIRST TO BOSTON AND LATE* TO 
 WASHINGTON. 
 
 Our candid author "seeking for the truth of history wher- 
 ever it can be found," having carefully suppressed all the con- 
 temporaneous evidence that proves the "recollections" of his 
 witnesses to be wholly incorrect as to the origin and purpose 
 of Whitman's ride, calmly assumes that he went to Washington 
 before he went to Boston (Cf. pp. 5, 42, 68), though no one has 
 yet found a single sentence from the pen of either Dr. Whit- 
 man or his wife that gives the least information as to whether 
 he went first to Boston or to Washington, nor has a single 
 statement been found in any contemporaneous letter, book or 
 newspaper on that point, nor in any subsequent letter, book or 
 newspaper till the Whitman Saved Oregon story had begun 
 to take shape, more than fifteen years after Whitman's ride. 
 
 A visit to Washington, either before or after his visit to 
 Boston, furnishes not the least proof that he was seeking to 
 affect the political destinies of Oregon in any way, since such 
 a visit was merely in the direct line of .his duty as a missionary 
 to the Oregon Indians, all the Indians being at that time under 
 the charge of the War Department, and not, as later, under 
 the Interior Department. 
 
 Every Indian missionary, therefore, returning from any 
 remote Indian tribe, would naturally endeavor, if possible, to 
 see the Secretary of War (the only Cabinet officer that Whit- 
 man in his letters claims to have seen, or with whom he claims 
 to have had any correspondence), especially if, as we know 
 from his own letters was the case with W T hitman, he had a 
 plan to propose to that officer to get government aid for the 
 Indians under his charge. (Cf. his letter of May 28, 1843, m 
 Tr. O. P. Assn. 1891, pp. 178-9, as follows : "J mean to im- 
 press upon the Secretary of War that sheep are more important 
 to Oregon's interest than soldiers. We want to get sheep and 
 stock from government for Indians, instead of money for their 
 lands. I have written him on the main interests of the Indian 
 country; but I mean still to write a private letter touching 
 some particular interests.") 
 
 There is no probability that the date of Whitman's visit to 
 Washington can be determined with certainty, farther than 
 that he could not possibly have been there earlier than March 
 12 to 15, and probably not before March 20 to 25, while it is 
 altogether likely that he went there somewhere about April 10 
 or 12, after visiting Boston. 
 
 I have spent no small amount of time and money trying to 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 77 
 
 trace his journey, with the result that no trace can be found of 
 his whereabouts between February 15, 1843, when, according 
 to his own statement to the Prudential Committee of the 
 American Board, as appears in their records, he reached West- 
 port, Mo., and March 28, 1843, when he called on the editor of 
 the New York Tribune. 
 
 Rev. M. Eells says (Reply, p 89) : "He was at New York 
 March 28, according to a letter of his now extant, which he 
 wrote from that place to the government in regard to some 
 claims of W. H. Gray against the government." 
 
 So general have I found Mr. Eells' inaccuracy that I now 
 never accept any statement of his without investigation, and in 
 this matter, after writing a half dozen letters, and finally 
 obtaining from the Indian Bureau a copy of this letter, I found 
 it written not March 28, 1843, from New York, but April 8, 
 1843, fromi Boston. It is brief and absolutely inconsequential 
 as to any point under discussion herein, and gives no hint as 
 to his either having been or intending to go to Washington. 
 
 With the rivers frozen as they were in that uncommonly 
 severe winter of 1842-43, it is absolutely certain that a poor 
 man, like Whitman, provided in advance with no relays oi 
 horses, and traveling by saddle to St. Louis, and by coach from 
 there, even if he went first to Washington, could not have 
 reached there till some time late in March, and, indeed, Spald- 
 ing's first account, in the Pacific for October 19, 1865, said : 
 "He reached Washington last March, 1843." But this "recol- 
 lection" was promptly "amended" so as to place him there 
 March 2, as soon as attention was called to the fact that the 
 Twenty-seventh Congress expired by limitation March 3, 1843. 
 (Cf. Spalding's lecture, Sen. Ex. Doc. 37, 41 Con., 3d Sess., 
 p. 21.) 
 
 As he must have learned of the signing and of the terms of 
 the Ashburton treaty as soon as he reached the frontier, and 
 of the expiration of the Twenty-seventh Congress before leav- 
 ing St. Louis, no occasion existed for him to hasten to Wash- 
 ington, even if we suppose him conceited enough (which I do 
 not believe he was) to suppose he could affect the political 
 destinies of Oregon by going there ; nor is there the least 
 probability, if he did seek to accomplish any political result at 
 Washington, that he would deem it wise for him to go there 
 till after going to Boston, and getting the decision of the 
 American Board on the question of whether or not they would 
 rescind their destructive order of February, 1842, and continue 
 the Southern branch of the mission (*. c, his own and Spal- 
 ding's stations), whose discontinuance in the opinion of all the 
 missionaries meant the total destruction of the mission. (Cf. 
 Walker's letter of February 28, 1843, an d Whitman's letter of 
 
78 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 April I, 1847.) Unless he could secure the rescission of that 
 order, he — an utterly unknown man — could only appear before 
 the authorities at Washington as an unsuccessful and discred- 
 ited missionary, whose six years' labors among the Oregon 
 Indians had been so unsatisfactory that 1 his mission board had 
 issued an order which meant the total destruction of the 
 mission. 
 
 If, however, he could (as he did) get that order rescinded, 
 he could go to Washington with the prestige of a missionary 
 who had made a brave winter's ride across the continent, and 
 secured the rescission of an unwise order of his mission board. 
 
 This statement of absolutely indisputable facts shows how 
 potent were the reasons impelling* him to go first to Boston. 
 That this was perfectly well understood by him, and was his 
 plan when he left Oregon, , is certain from the following pas- 
 sages in his wife's two letters hereinbefore quoted (pp. 15-18 
 ante), and which, as we have seen, our candid and truth-seek- 
 ing author carefully refrains from quoting. 
 
 In that of September 29, 1842, she does not allude to Wash- 
 ington at all, but wrote : "He wishes to reach Boston as early 
 as possible, so as to make arrangements to return next summer 
 if prospered. The interests of the missionary cause in this 
 country calls him home." 
 
 September 30 she wrote : "He goes upon important business 
 as connected with the missionary cause, the cause of Christ in 
 this land, which I will leave for him to explain when you see 
 him, because I have not time to enlarge. ... He has for 
 a companion Mr. Lovejoy, a respectable, intelligent man and 
 a lawyer, but not a Christian, who expects to accompany him 
 all the way to Boston, as his friends are in that region, and 
 perhaps to Washington." 
 
 Between April 8 or 9, 1843, when Whitman left Boston, and 
 April 20, when he left Rushville, N. Y., for his return to 
 Oregon, there was ample time for him to go to Washington, 
 which he could then have reached in a night and a day from 
 Boston. 
 
 On p. 42 Dr. Eells says : "Another letter has been found at 
 Washington which states what he tried to do there before he 
 went to Boston." This is characteristically disingenuous, since 
 in that letter, and its accompanying draft of a bill (published 
 in Tr. Or. P. A., 1891, pp. 69-78, and of which I have had a 
 manuscript copy for seventeen years), there is nothing from 
 which it can be determined whether or not he was in Wash- 
 ington, before or after his visit to Boston. These documents, 
 written soon after Whitman's return to Oregon, have been 
 repeatedly published by advocates of the Whitman Legend, as 
 if they were of much importance, and proved that Whitman 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 79 
 
 had a great influence in the Oregon policy of the government ; 
 but it is certain that they did not in the slightest degree influ- 
 ence governmental action, and as they were never printed, nor 
 the fact of their existence published till nearly forty years after 
 Whitman's death, it is evident that they furnished no informa- 
 tion to the public, and could not have influenced public opinion 
 in any way. 
 
 They can be found in Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman 
 Saved Oregon" (pp. 315-332), and in Mowry's "Marcus Whit- 
 man" (pp. 274-284), and the letter only in Craighead's "Story 
 of Marcus Whitman" (pp. 197-204). 
 
 The provisions of the proposed bill were so totally imprac- 
 ticable that not only was no one of them ever enacted into law, 
 but so far as can be ascertained no one of them was ever even 
 submitted to a committee of Congress for consideration, it 
 appearing from the endorsement on the document that it was 
 received at the War Department June 22, 1844, and filed, and 
 never read again by anybody till advocates of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon story, in their vain search for some evidence that 
 Whitman influenced the National policy, unearthed these two 
 documents — interesting, it is true, as showing how unpractical 
 and visionary were many of Whitman's plans, but furnishing 
 not the least support to the theory that he either informed the 
 public or influenced governmental action about Oregon. 
 
 MR. EELLS' MANY "WITNESSES/"' 
 
 In my forthcoming book T shall discuss in some detail quite 
 a number of the "numerous witnesses" that Mr. Eells relies 
 upon to prove the Whitman Saved Oregon story, but having 
 m this review shown how he suppresses and juggles with all 
 the vital testimony of the witnesses who knew of their own 
 knowledge exactly what caused Whitman's ride, I must, for 
 want of space, pass all the other witnesses who from twenty- 
 five to forty years after the event (during from ten to twenty 
 years of which they had been hearing the pleasing story that 
 Whitman's ride was to save Oregon) thought they remembered 
 hearing Whitman tell them the story, except two, whom I 
 select because, first, it has been possible for me to apply to 
 them that indispensable requisite for arriving at the truth — the 
 cross-examination ; second, they were both somewhat prominent 
 men ; third, not being connected in any way with the Oregon 
 Mission, and never having lived in Oregon, they are generally 
 considered to be thoroughly disinterested witnesses, and, fourth, 
 they both furnish excellent illustrations of the danger of basing 
 history on memory, many years after the event and unsupported 
 by contemporaneous written records (especially when the mem- 
 ory is not of one's own acts, but of conversations with others), 
 
8o RBV. DR. BELLS' SEARCH (f) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 and also of the facility with which actions and conversations 
 are transferred in the memory even of honest and well-mean- 
 ing- people, from the real doers of them to the heroes of legend- 
 ary tales, especially when their occupations are the same and 
 their names much alike. 
 
 JUDGE JAMES OTIS OF CHICAGO. 
 
 The first is the late James Otis of Chicago (quoted in "Re- 
 ply/' P- 75)- He first appeared as a "witness" in Rev. Dr. 
 Thomas Laurie's article, in Missionary Herald, September, 
 1885, as follows: "If, now, Dr. Whitman could rise from his 
 martyr grave and give us his testimony, the matter would be 
 settled beyond dispute, and God, who, 'When his people went 
 about from nation to nation, suffered no man to do them wrong ; 
 yea, reproved kings for their sakes, saying, "Touch not mine 
 anointed ones, and do my prophets no harm," ' has most won- 
 derfully interposed to vindicate the memory of his servant. 
 Soon after the article appeared in the Herald for February, I 
 received the following letter from Judge Jamies Otis of Chi- 
 cago: Tn the month of April, 1843, Dr. M. Whitman and my- 
 self were at the same hotel in Buffalo, N. Y., waiting for the ice 
 to leave the harbor, so that we could take the steamboat for 
 Cleveland, Ohio. After some four days we took the stage for 
 Dunkirk and thence went by boat to Cleveland. He was a good 
 talker and a man of great observation. He gave me an account 
 of his experience among the western Indians ; his trip to Wash- 
 ington; his interview with Webster at Washington, who, he 
 said, listened with much interest to his statements, and then re- 
 marked : "I want the President and Cabinet to hear what you 
 have said to me." They were called together, and Dr. Whitman 
 spent an evening with the Cabinet, answering their questions 
 and giving them his views as to the importance of Oregon and 
 the steps that needed to be taken in order to secure it for this 
 country. Our life together at the hotel and on the boat was 
 intensely interesting. At Cleveland we were told that the boat 
 would not sail under ten hours, so Dr. Whitman proposed that 
 we walk up town and see something of the city. A slight snow 
 had covered the ground, and when we reached the top of the 
 hill the doctor saw a steeple and said : "Let us go to that church, 
 for there is something about a church that always interests me." 
 We reached it and walked along its southern side, where the 
 sun had thawed the snow, and the green grass had started up 
 fresh and beautiful. The doctor remarked : "This green grass 
 by the side of this church is the smile of the Lord on the work 
 to be done by its minister and members for Christ in this grow- 
 ing city." ' I quote this last paragraph lest any should charge 
 Judge Otis with lapse of memory. The man who so distinctly 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 81 
 
 remembers that scene at the church in Cleveland can be trusted 
 to recall the words of Dr. Whitman about his visit to Wash- 
 ington." 
 
 Now, the fact is that Mr. James Otis was never a judge, 
 nor even a lawyer, but a man of very ordinary education, who 
 had accumulated a fortune in real estate, and had his office 
 with his brother, L. B. Otis, who was a lawyer, and had been 
 a judge. As the winter of 1842-3 was an uncommonly severe 
 one, it was evident to me that navigation was not open on Lake 
 Erie as early as March (for the real date of this incident was 
 March, and not April, as the Missionary Herald prints it), and 
 as Whitman was not given to gush, I thought as soon as I 
 read this that it sounded much more like the garrulous, con- 
 ceited Dr. W 7 hite than the reticent Dr. Whitman. I therefore 
 wrote to Mr. Otis, asking him of he had any diary or letters or 
 other written documents by which he could determine certainly 
 whether it was 1842 or 1843 when he met a missionary to the 
 Oregon Indians at Buffalo, as stated in his letter to Rev. Dr. 
 Laurie. Under date of Chicago, April 18, 1887, he replied as 
 follows: "At the time I wrote the communication to the Mis- 
 sionary Herald, I was of the opinion that it was in March, 1843, 
 that I met Dr. Whitman. Since then I have found some entries 
 in a memorandum that fixes the date 1842. . . . We were 
 together most of the month of March at Buffalo and that vicin- 
 ity. The blockade of ice prevented the arrival of a steamboat 
 to take us to Cleveland. ... It was in January or Febru- 
 ary that the doctor was in Washington. . . . Have you 
 any data to fix the year that Whitman left Oregon for Wash- 
 ington, D. C. ? Forty- four years is a long time to call up events 
 to a certainty unless one has memorandum to refer to." This 
 letter furnishes abundant proof of the correctness of that last 
 sentence, for, as we shall see, Mr. Otis never in his life saw or 
 corresponded with Dr. Whitman ; and instead of spending 
 "most of the month of March," 1842, with Dr. White, whom 
 he did meet, he could not have spent more than from March 
 17 to March 23, even if he started with him from Havana, 
 N. Y. (Cf. p. 1, Medorem Crawford's Journal). It also ap- 
 pears from this letter that he wrote "March" in his letter to the 
 Missionary Herald, and that they changed the date to April, as 
 they well knew that Whitman could not have been in Buffalo 
 in March, and so, to have printed it as written would have fur- 
 nished no "support" to the W'hitman Saved Oregon story. A 
 few months later I called on Mr. Otis in his office, and he re- 
 peated this to me and asked me where Whitman was in the 
 spring of 1842, to which I replied that he was in Oregon con- 
 tinuously from the autumn of 1836 to October, 1842, and added, 
 "you must have met at Buffalo not Dr. Marcus Whitman, but 
 Dr. Elijah White, an ex-Methodist missionary to the Oregon 
 
82 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Indians, who, in 1842, went via Buffalo and Cleveland to St. 
 Louis, and thence to Independence, Mo., whence he led to 
 Oregon the first large overland migration." Mr. Otis also told 
 me that he never had seen nor corresponded with this Oregon 
 Indian missionary before nor after this meeting with him in 
 the spring of 1842. Having looked the subject up pretty thor- 
 oughly, and learned that following the mild winter of 1841-2 
 navigation on Lake Erie opened March 7, 1842, but that (as 
 occasionally happens) later in the month (from March 18 to 
 23) floating ice from the upper lakes driven by a strong wind 
 had temporarily blocked the harbor of Buffalo against the weak 
 wooden craft then navigating the Great Lakes, and that March 
 18, Dr. White and Medorem Crawford and three others ar- 
 rived in Buffalo, and had precisely the experience that Otis 
 narrates of being detained several days, and finally driving in a 
 wagon to Cattaraugus Creek, twenty miles west of Buffalo and 
 outside the field of floating ice, and there taking steamer for 
 Erie and Cleveland, I wrote Mr. Otis a courteous letter, set- 
 ting forth these facts, and further, that as navigation after the 
 uncommonly severe winter of 1842-3 did not open on Lake 
 Erie till May 6, 1843, an d as Whitman wrote from St. Louis 
 May 12, 1843, an< 3, as the world then was he could not have 
 gone from Buffalo to St. Louis in six days, it was certain that 
 Whitman did not go via Buffalo and steamer on Lake Erie, and 
 urging him to make public a correction of his evident error. 
 To this letter he never replied, but, being a very self-opinion- 
 ated man and an ardent supporter of the A. B. C. F. M., and 
 like many another rich old man, unwilling to admit that he had 
 ever made a mistake, he continued to the day of his death 
 (September 14, 1895) — as I know from a legal friend who had 
 an office in the Otis block — to repeat the story that in March, 
 1843, ne met Marcus Whitman at Buffalo, and spent several 
 days with him at a hotel there, and went on a steamer with 
 him to Cleveland, though it is certain that it was Dr. Elijah! 
 White with whom he had this experience in March, 1842. My 
 legal friend, who was intimately acquainted with James Otis 
 for many years, said : "You could never find evidence enough 1 
 to convince James Otis he was wrong in any position he had 
 ever publicly taken." P. B. Whitman, Dr. Whitman's nephew, 
 a boy of thirteen, whom he took back to Oregon in 1843, wrote 
 me (and has written to several other people), that they left 
 Rushville, April 20, 1843, an d went to Olean on the Alleghany 
 River, and thence by the Alleghany, and Ohio, and Mississippi 
 Rivers to St. Louis ; and while Perrin B. Whitman's "recollec- 
 tions" of conversations with his uncle and other people are 
 plainly untrustworthy from his youth, his recollection of the 
 route over which he himself went on this, the first long journey 
 he ever made, can be relied upon, especially as it agrees with 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 83 
 
 all the other settled facts of the matter. So, in spite of the 
 pious paean of scriptural quotation with which Dr. Laurie in- 
 troduced this "witness/' it is evident that "God had not most 
 wonderfully interposed to vindicate the memory of his serv- 
 ant/' by the statement volunteered by Mr. James Otis. 
 
 DR. SILAS REED. 
 
 This "witness" also appeared first in 1885, in a long letter to 
 L. G. Tyler, President of William and Mary College, Vir- 
 ginia. This letter was published in Vol. 2, "Letters and Times 
 of the Tylers," pages 692-9. It is so long that I can only notice 
 part of its errors. I have been unable to learn just how old 
 Dr. Reed was when he wrote this, but he was evidently a 
 pretty old man, and before my attention was called to it he had 
 died, so that I could not cross-examine him personally, but only 
 cross-examine his statement by comparing it with indisputable 
 public documents and other printed matter to which Dr. Reed 
 had easy access, but to which he seems not to have thought it 
 worth while to refer for a moment to refresh and correct his 
 memory before writing this long letter, full from beginning to 
 end of errors. (Page 695) Dr. Reed wrote: 
 
 "I passed the winter of 1841-2 in Washington City. I had 
 been appointed by President Tyler in the first month of his 
 administration, April, 1841, as Surveyor General of the States 
 of Illinois and Missouri. Shortly afterward Mr. Tyler was 
 unfortunately persuaded by the Clay wing of the Harrison 
 and Tyler party to call an extra session of Congress for the 
 summer of 1841. The Clay men, while I remained 
 at my post in St. Louis, traduced me in the Senate, and 
 in August enforced my rejection. My pride of character would 
 not submit to such wholesale murder by a stab in the dark. 
 Upon the opening of the session of the Senate, in December, 
 1 84 1, I called upon that body, through their Public Land Com- 
 mittee, to furnish me the cause of my rejection. . . . 
 While the Public Land Committee of the Senate were acting 
 .upon my case at intervals during the winter, I took every op- 
 portunity to press upon the mind of Mr. Tyler the importance 
 of a government expedition to explore a route across the Rocky 
 Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia River, even if no 
 other public benefit were gained than to make known the best 
 line of travel for our emigrants to Oregon, who in large num- 
 bers began to pick out their way through the mountain passes 
 into Oregon, the previous year of 1841. My noble friend, 
 Senator Linn of Missouri, Chairman of the Committee on Ter- 
 ritories, had about that time introduced a bill to organize 
 Oregon into a Territory of the United States. Colonel Gilpen, 
 afterward Governor of Colorado, returned that winter from a 
 
84 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH {?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 private expedition down and up the Columbia River, and I 
 had the extreme pleasure of listening to his eloquent and fascin- 
 ating descriptions of that country during many interviews with 
 Senators Linn and Breese, who were collecting material to use 
 before the Senate in their discussion upon the merits of the 
 bill, which almost the whole Senate treated with a smile of im- 
 patience and indifference whenever the subject was called to 
 their attention. From Dr. Whitman, a missionary to Oregon, 
 much useful information for emigrants and the Senators who 
 had charge of the bill was also obtained at that time." 
 
 That Dr. Reed's recollection of what winter it was 
 that he was in Washington is trustworthy is evident 
 from his very great personal interest in his contest 
 for the very important and lucrative office of Sur- 
 veyor General of the two great States of Missouri 
 and Illinois, to which, he informs us further on in the letter, 
 the President renominated him "On the 14th of March, 1842, 
 and on the 17th I was unanimously confirmed," (which we find 
 verified by examination of the Sen. Ex. Journal for that 
 date), but that his recollections as to the other matters in this 
 quotation are wholly erroneous I shall speedily demonstrate. 
 (1.) As to the calling of that special session of Congress — 
 the first session of the twenty-seventh Congress — Mr. Tyler had 
 no more to do with that call than "the Man in the Moon." 
 Though it did not assemble till after his most untimely death, 
 it was called, not by Mr. Tyler "shortly after" Reed's appoint- 
 ment in April, 1841, but on March 17, 1841, by President Har- 
 rison, a fact distinctly stated by President Tyler in his message 
 to it, (as Dr. Reed could have ascertained by five minutes' ex- 
 amination of the Cong. Globe, 1st Sess., 27th Cong., 1841, p. 7, 
 or "Messages of the Presidents, Vol. IV., p. 21). Dr. Reed's 
 assertion, therefore, that "Mr. Tyler was unfortunately per- 
 suaded by the Clay wing of the Harrison and Tyler party to 
 call an extra session of Congress for the summer of 1841," is 
 without even a shadow of foundation in fact. . 
 
 (2.) As to the grotesque inaccuracy of Dr. Reed's state- 
 ment that "Almost the whole Senate treated Linn's bill with a 
 smile of indifference or impatience," it is only necessary to re- 
 fer the reader to the Congressional Globe, Twenty-seventh 
 Congress, third session, for the record of the great debate on 
 that bill in the Senate, the report of which covers 165 columns, 
 and in which, of a total membership of fifty, twenty-seven sen- 
 ators took part. 
 
 (3.) As to "a large number of emigrants to Oregon in 
 1841." A letter of Mrs. Whitman, dated "Wielatpoo, Oregon 
 Territory, October 1, 1841," and published in Transactions of 
 the Oregon Pioneer Association for 1891, pages 139-145, says 
 (p. 139) : "The emigrants were twenty- four in number — two 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 85 
 
 families, with small children, from Missouri. This company 
 was much larger when they started. About thirty went another 
 route to California. The company of Jesuits were twelve in 
 number." 
 
 These Catholic priests went from Fort Hall to the Flat- 
 head country, in what is now northwest Montana, without 
 going to Wielatpoo or Wialatpu. That is, counting those who 
 went to California, the total overland migration to both Oregon 
 and California that year, men, women and children, was sixty- 
 six persons, and to Oregon, counting Catholic missionaries and 
 all, only thirty-six. Surely this is not "large numbers" for a 
 population of 15,000,000 to 17,000,000 people to send out. The 
 first overland migration that can properly be called large was 
 that which went in 1842, under Dr. White, which numbered 
 112 persons. 
 
 (4.) As to Colonel Gilpin {not Gilpen, as Reed spells it), 
 Dr. Reed writes : "Colonel Gilpen, afterwards Governor of 
 Colorado, returned that winter from a private expedition down 
 and up the Columbia River, and I had the extreme pleasure of 
 listening to his eloquent and fascinating descriptions of that 
 country during many interviews with Senators Linn and Breese, 
 who were collecting material to use before the Senate in their 
 discussions on the merits of the bill " (i. e., the bill for the oc- 
 cupation Oregon, W. I. M.). Now, it should be remembered 
 when considering these statements, that Gilpin was a very 
 prominent man in the West for half a century after this winter 
 of 1841-42, and a man whom Reed (who was Surveyor General 
 of Missouri and Illinois under President Tyler, and of Wyom- 
 ing under General Grant) must have met scores of times dur- 
 ing his own long residence in official capacities west of the Mis- 
 sissippi, yet it is as certain as that two and two are four that 
 all this which Reed is so positive he recollects about Gilpin in 
 the winter of 1841-42 is totally false. Gilpin did not go to 
 Oregon till 1843, when he accompanied Fremont's second ex- 
 ploring expedition, but instead of continuing with Fremont on 
 his journey from the Dalles south along the east base of the 
 Cascade Mountains in the late autumn of 1843 an, d the winter 
 of 1843-44, and across the Sierra Nevadas into the Sacramento 
 Valley, he remained in Oregon the winter of 1843-44, and re- 
 turned to the States via Fort Hall, Fort Bridger and Bent's 
 Fort in the summer and autumn of 1844. 
 
 Gilpin, therefore, was certainly never in Washington after 
 he was "down and up the Columbia River" earlier than the 
 winter of 1844-5 (*• e -> three years later than Reed "remem- 
 bers" these many interviews with him and "Senator's Linn and 
 Breese") (Cf. on this (a) Sen. Ex. Doc. 174, 28th Cong., 2d 
 Sess., being reports of Fremont's first and second exploring 
 expeditions.) Page 107: "We were joined here" (i. e., at 
 
86 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Elm Grove, in what is now Kansas, on May 31, 1843) "by 
 Mr. William Gilpin of Missouri, who, intending this year to 
 visit the settlements in Oregon, had been invited to accompany 
 us, and proved a useful and agreeable addtion to the party." 
 
 Idem., page 195, describing his return to the Dalles from Ft. 
 Vancouver, under date of November 18, 1843, Fremont writes: 
 "Early in the afternoon we arrived again at the Dalles. . . . 
 My friend, Mr. Gilpin, had arrived in advance of the party. 
 . . . On the following day he continued his journey in our 
 returning boats to Vancouver. ,, 
 
 (b) "Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth," 
 seven volumes, H. H. Bancroft, San Francisco, 189 1. Vol. 1, 
 pages 506-66, inclusive, is a biography of William Gilpin, with 
 portrait. In 1840- 1-2, instead of traveling "down and up the 
 Columbia River," he was residing in Missouri (p. 522). In 
 June, 1 843, he started for Oregon and joined Fremont's party. 
 
 (P. 528) : "On the 10th of April, 1844, he left Fort Van- 
 couver." 
 
 (P. 529) : "July 4, 1844, they were at Soda Springs (in what 
 is now the southeastern part of Idaho) on their return to the 
 States. 
 
 (c) Gilpin's testimony in the case of the Hudson's Bay 
 Company and Puget's Sound Agricultural Company vs. the 
 United States, covering pages 330-339 of Volume 6 of that case 
 and given at Washington, in February, 1867, which states (p. 
 331) : "I visited and remained several days at Fort Hall, going 
 out to the Pacific Sea in September, 1843, an d returned from 
 the Pacific in June, 1844, remaining at this time several weeks 
 at the Fort/' (P. 332.) Int. 12: "How long and when were 
 \ou at Walla Walla? Answer. In October, 1843, some eight 
 days; in April and May, 1844, some twenty-five or thirty 
 days." P. 333.) Int. 16: "When and how long and under 
 what circumstances did you visit Fort Vancouver?" Answer. 
 My recollection is that I visited Vancouver in November, 1843 ; 
 in February, 1844, an d April, 1844. I was there about ten 
 days on each occasion, and on the last two occasions was spe- 
 cially the guest of Governor John McLoughlin, and was treated 
 by him with the greatest hospitality and kindness." 
 
 (5.) Furthermore, as Senator Louis F. Linn died October 
 3, 1843, when Gilpin was with Fremont's party in the Snake 
 River Valley, 208 miles west of Fort Hall on the way to and 
 about 275 miles east of the Columbia, (Cf. Fremont's Rept. 
 Sen. Ex. Doc., No. 174, p. 170), it is absolutely certain that 
 not only is Dr. Reed entirely mistaken in saying that in the 
 winter of 1841-42, "I had the extreme pleasure of listening to 
 his eloquent and fascinating description of that country" (i. e., 
 Oregon) "during many interviews with Senators Linn and 
 Breese," but that he never during any other winter was pres- 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH 87 
 
 ent at any interviews between Colonel Gilpin and Senator Linn 
 after Gilpin visited Oregon. 
 
 (6.) "From Dr. Whitman, a missionary to Oregon, much 
 useful information for emigrants and the Senators who had 
 charge of the bill was also obtained at that time." All that 
 needs to be observed as to the falsity of this is that "at that 
 time," i. e., the winter of 1841-42, Dr. W'hitman was by the 
 traveled route more than 2,500 miles, or four to five months' 
 journey from Washington. There can be no doubt but what 
 the Oregon Indian missionary whom Dr. Reed saw in Wash- 
 ington was Dr. Elijah White, who, we know from contem- 
 porary sources, was there at that precise time, and had inter- 
 views with the President, Secretaries Webster, Upshur and 
 Spencer, Senators Linn and Benton and other friends of 
 Oregon. 
 
 (7.) As to Fremont's exploring expedition, I shall make 
 no further criticism of the account which Dr. Reed gives of its 
 origin, (which want of space forbids quoting), than to say that 
 it squarely contradicts the account that Senator Benton gave 
 many years ago, while Fremont, and Colonel Abert, and Presi- 
 dent Tyler were all alive, and could have corrected it, if need- 
 ful, to square with what Reed thought he recollected about it in 
 1885, when Tyler, and Abert, and Benton were all dead, and 
 Fremont employed in a distant part of the country where he 
 was not likely to see Reed's letter. 
 
 (Cf. Vol. 2 of Benton's "Thirty Years' Views," published 
 1854-56, p. 478 et. seq., for Fremont's 1st Expedition, and p. 
 579 for his 2d Expedition.) 
 
 But when Dr. Reed comes to speak of what it accomplished, 
 he is exceedingly wide of the mark. He says, "Fremont made 
 ready to start from St. Louis with his expedition as soon as 
 there was green grass to subsist his animals upon, with an out- 
 fit of fifty to sixty men, after leaving Independence, Mo., and 
 moved up the Platte River and its north branches to the old 
 South Pass, and thence to the headwaters of the Snake (or 
 Lewis) River, and down it and the Columbia River to Astoria, 
 thus avoiding Mexican Territory, but kept close along its north- 
 ern border after he entered Oregon Territory." 
 
 Instead of fifty to sixty men he had twenty-six men and Ben- 
 ton's son, a boy of twelve (Cf. Sen. Ex. Doc. 174, 28 Cong., 
 2d Sess., pp. 9-10), and instead of "journeying to the Colum- 
 bia" on this first expedition, Fremont only went to the South 
 Pass, and north from there to Fremont's Peak in the Wind 
 River Mountains, and thence back to Missouri by the same 
 route he went out on, and was never, on that first expedition, 
 within 700 to 800 miles of the Columbia, and not within fifty to 
 seventy-five miles of any tributary of the Lewis or Snake Fork 
 of the Columbia. 
 
88 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 On his second expedition, instead of fifty to sixty men, his 
 party consisted of thirty-nine men (Cf. Sen. Ex. Doc. 174, 28th 
 Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 105-6), and instead of "avoiding Mexi- 
 can Territory," he, like all the other overland travelers at that 
 time, traveled from Green River, about 125 miles in Mexi- 
 can Territory (Cf., p. 133 of his report, Doc. 174, above 
 mentioned), and then turned aside from the route to Oregon, 
 and spent nearly a month more in Mexican Territory, examin- 
 ing the Great Salt Lake and the country about it, and after he 
 reached the Columbia he did not "go down the Columbia River 
 to Astoria," but only as far as Fort Vancouver, nearly 100 
 miles up the river from Astoria, and thence he journeyed east 
 up the river again to the Dalles, and thence south on the east 
 side of the Cascade and Sierra Nevadas, and then west across 
 the Sierras to the Sacramento Valley, as Dr. Reed ought to 
 have known, and certainly could have found in an hour's ex- 
 amination of Fremont's Report hereinbefore quoted. 
 
 On page 194 of the report of his second expedition, under 
 date of November 8-9, 1843, after describing his arrival at 
 Fort Vancouver, and his most hospitable reception by Dr. Mc- 
 Loughlin, the Superintendent of the Hudson's Bay Company's 
 affairs beyond the Rocky Mountains, he says, "In the space of 
 two days our preparations had been completed, and we were 
 ready to set out on our return. It would have been very grati- 
 fying to have gone down to the Pacific, and, solely in the in- 
 terest and the love of geography, to have seen the ocean on the 
 western as the eastern side of the continent, so as to give a 
 satisfactory completeness to the geographical picture which 
 had been formed in our minds ; but the rainy season had now 
 regularly set in, and the air was filled with fogs and rain, which 
 left no beauty in any scenery, and obstructed observations. 
 The object of my instructions had been entirely fulfilled in hav- 
 ing connected our reconnaissance with the surveys of Captain 
 Wilkes." 
 
 That Reed meant Fremont's first expedition (which was in 
 1842) is evident from his very next sentence, which is as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 "The following winter, 1842-3, Dr. Whitman, the Oregon 
 missionary, returned to the East and furnished valuable data 
 about Oregon and the practicability of a wagon route thereto 
 across the mountains." This sentence, taken in connection with 
 what he has said before about Dr. Whitman having been in 
 Washington in the winter of 1841-42, shows that he supposed, 
 as late as 1885, that Dr. Whitman, having appeared before 
 Linn and Breese (as we know Dr. White did in January and 
 February, 1&42), had gone to Oregon in the summer of 1842, 
 and returned in the winter of 1842-43. 
 
 Now, if President Tyler, Colonel Gilpin and Senator Linn 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH 89 
 
 were particular friends of Dr. Reed, and his memory played 
 such fantastic tricks as contemporaneous official documents to 
 which he had easy access (to wit: President Tyler's 1st mes- 
 sage, Fremont's report, and the Cong. Globe for date of Linn's 
 death) prove it did, concerning such well known and important 
 public men and events, as the calling of the special session of 
 Congress, in 1841, the extent of Fremont's explorations in 1842 
 and 1843, tne time of Gilpin's visit to Oregon and the absolute 
 impossibility of his ever having had any interviews with Linn 
 after his visit to Oregon, of what conceivable value can that 
 memory be about so little known an individual as Dr. Whitman, 
 whom he does not claim ever to have seen after the time he 
 thinks he saw him in the winter of 1841-42, but when, in fact, 
 we know that Dr. Whitman was 2,500 miles distant from him, 
 or, as the world then was, a good 125 to 150 days' journey, 
 and when it is absolutely certain from contemporaneous docu- 
 ments, i. e., "White's Narrative" and Secretary of War Spen- 
 cer's letter, and White's appointment as Indian agent, that the 
 Oregon missionary he really saw at that time in Washington 
 was Dr. Elijah White, and not Dr. Marcus Whitman? 
 
 Dr. White, ex-missionary to the Oregon Indians, very closely 
 resembled in name and occupation Dr. Whitman, missionary to 
 the Oregon Indians, so that Dr. Reed and, doubtless, most of 
 the other "numerous witnesses" whose statements, made many 
 years after the event and wholly unsupported by contemporane- 
 ous documents, Rev. Dr. Eells depends upon to sustain the 
 Whitman Saved Oregon story, could very easily confound them 
 and transfer White's acts to Whitman. 
 
 But there were no other men in the country with names and 
 occupations so like those of his personal and intimate friends, 
 President Tyler, Colonol Gilpin, Lieutenant Fremont and 
 Senator Linn, that Reed could confounti with them, yet 
 see how egregiously he blunders about each of these 
 prominent public men, whose acts at that time had been in 
 print, in easily accessible books for more than forty years, 
 when Reed wrote this letter, in which there are many other 
 errors that I have not space to examine. 
 
 A very characteristic sample of Mr. Eells' candor is seen 
 in his mention (Reply, pp. in and 116) of the first three 
 wagons which ever went through to the Columbia, in August 
 and September, 1840, (an account of which was printed in 
 Trans. O. P. Assn., for 1877, p. 22). These wagons had been 
 left at Fort Hall, not on account of any opposition of the Hud- 
 son's Bay Company to wagons going farther, but on account of 
 the fatigue of the teams of their owners, in 1839 an d 1840. 
 
 Two of them were owned by Robert Newell, and Caleb 
 Wilkins owned the third. Newell sold one of his to Frederic 
 Ermatinger (who was the H. B. Co.'s trader in command of 
 
go REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 Ft Hall in 1838, 1839, J ^4° anc ^ 1 ^ > 4 I )> an d though with their 
 small number and lack of tools for roadmaking they were 
 only able to get through with the running gear, that was 
 enough to prove beyond any question that whenever a resolute 
 and tolerably harmonious party of 100 or more men, provided 
 with shovels, picks and axes should try it, they could drive a 
 train of loaded wagons through with no serious delay. 
 
 The simple fact that not only were these wagons outfitted at 
 Fort Hall, where, according to all the advocates of the Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon story, there was determined and continuous 
 opposition to wagons going farther, but that one of them was 
 purchased for the journey by Ermatinger, and by him out- 
 fitted and driven through to Walla Walla, of itself, when the 
 facts are honestly stated, reduces to senseless drivel all the 
 scores of pages that Rev. M. Eells and the other advocates of 
 the Whitman Saved Oregon story have ever printed about the 
 Hudson's Bay Company's opposition to wagons going beyond 
 Fort Hall. 
 
 It is absolutely certain that Mr. Eells knows all about these 
 wagons, for not only does he have the Transactions of the 
 O. P. A., but about fifteen years ago I wrote him fully about 
 this precise thing, and in his answer he did not pretend to deny 
 any of the facts stated in the account in Transactions of 1877. 
 
 (But as the whole Whitman Saved Oregon legend crumbles 
 to dust, if there was not constant opposition to wagons going 
 beyond Fort Hall, Mr. Eells — knowing well that very few of 
 his readers would ever know any more about these wagons 
 than he might choose to tell — ingeniously avoids not only all 
 mention of Ermatinger's part in' this work, but also all mention 
 of the fact that the wagons were outfitted at Fort Hall, and 
 writes (on p. in, Reply,), as follows: "He" (i. e., Dr. Whit- 
 man) "knew . . . that in 1840, Dr. Robert Newell, Colonel 
 Joseph L. Meek and two others had taken three wagons to 
 Walla Walla," and (p. 116) describing what he is pleased to 
 call "the victories" which Americans won over the Hudson's 
 Bay Company and its (purely imaginary) opposition to Ameri- 
 cans going to Oregon, and especially to wagons going beyond 
 Fort Hall, he writes: "When four years later" (*. e., than 
 1836) "Dr. Robert Newell and company took three wagons to 
 Walla Walla, the enemy was again overcome," than which 
 more preposterous nonsense was never penned — even in sup- 
 port of the Whitman legend. 
 
 If Rev. M. Eells and the other advocates of the Whitman 
 Saved Oregon story would print even a small part of the corre- 
 spondence and diaries of Whitman and his associates, which 
 they have carefully suppressed for the past thirty-eight years, 
 everybody reading it could easily "cross-examine" most of his 
 "numerous witnesses" by comparison of their statements with 
 
REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH 91 
 
 that contemporaneous evidence, with results as destructive to 
 the value of their "testimony" as appears from my cross-ex- 
 amination of Mr. James Otis and Dr. Silas Reed. But as the 
 advocates of the Whitman legend will doubtless continue their 
 long-pursued policy of suppression, the public is not likely to 
 have a chance to read the real evidence in the matter till my 
 book on "The Acquisition of Oregon and the Long-Suppressed 
 Evidence About Marcus Whitman" appears, which, I trust, 
 will be before the end of 1904. 
 
 Rev. Dr. M. Eells asserts (Reply, p. 31) that the crediting 
 of the first vague version of the Whitman Saved Oregon story 
 (Cf., p. 234, infra.) to the Sacramento Bulletin instead of the 
 Sacramento Union is "the only mistake made by him in this 
 controversy" that has been found by Professor Bourne and 
 myself. 
 
 In this he does himself altogether too much honor. It is true 
 that it was the only one of his multitudinous errors that we 
 specifically pointed out, because both of us were then hunting 
 for vastly larger game than Rev. Dr. Myron Eells, to wit: 
 for the authors of the Whitman .Legend, and the historians and 
 other writers of considerable note who had been taken in by it, 
 and had imposed it on their readers as history. 
 
 But everything he has ever published in support of the Whit- 
 man Saved Oregon story is as full of blunders, and in every 
 was as worthless historically as this "Reply," and surely "Lan- 
 guage cannot further go" than that in its condemnation. 
 
 Mr. Eells (on pp. 120-22) quotes certain estimates concern- 
 ing Dr. Whitman, which, he says, are "A fitting reply to Pro- 
 fessor Marshall's statement that Dr. Whitman was not above a 
 third or a fourth rate man." These estimates are from A. Mc- 
 Kinlay and W. F. Tolmie, who knew Whitman, but both of 
 whom repudiate in toto the Saving Oregon story, though Rev. 
 M. Eells carefully refrains from so informing his readers; 
 From Judge O. C. Pratt, who never was in Oregon till more 
 than a year after Whitman's death ; from ex-United States Sen- 
 ator James K. Kelly, who was never in Oregon till three and a 
 half years after Whitman's death; from Hon. W. Lair Hill, 
 who was never in Oregon till six years after Whitman's death ; 
 and from Hon. Elwood Evans, one of the earliest investigators, 
 and, on investigation, opponents, of the Whitman Saved Oregon 
 story, and who for some years before 1878 had been imposed 
 upon by it. Whether he wrote this before or after he was con- 
 vinced of the falsity of the Whitman Saved Oregon story does 
 not appear, as Mr. Eells refrains from giving its date. 
 
 He also quotes from the Oregonian, but without giving the 
 date, or the author of the sentiments quoted, and from H. H. 
 Bancroft's "Oregon," but whether the opinion therein ex- 
 pressed was Bancroft's or Mrs. Victor's or that of some one 
 
92 REV. DR. EELLS' SEARCH (?) FOR TRUTH. 
 
 else whom he hired to compile that work, cannot be known, and 
 he concludes with a quotation from Professor Bourne, as fol- 
 lows: "Marcus Whitman was a devoted and heroic missionary, 
 who braved every hardship and imperiled his life for the cause 
 of Christian civilization in the northwest, and finally died at 
 his post, a sacrifice to the cause." 
 
 Concerning these, it only needs to be said that but one of 
 them, Professor Bourne, had ever examined the correspondence 
 of Whitman and his associates at the A. B. C. F. M. office in 
 Boston, and Professor Bourne's examination had not then gone 
 thoroughly enough into the correspondence after Whitman's 
 ride to understand the decadence of the mission, and the un- 
 wisdom of Whitman in obstinately remaining there, against the. 
 advice of McLoughlin, McKay and McKinlay, for several years 
 after every dictate of prudence and common sense should ha,ve 
 caused him to at least temporarily leave, and remain away "till 
 the hearts of the Indians should be better towards him," when 
 he doubtless would have been invited by them to return, and 
 might have finished his life among them in peace, and died 
 there of old age. 
 
 When the facts are published it will be evident to all that 
 instead of "dying at his post a sacrifice to the cause," the dread- 
 ful massacre in which not only his own life and that of his wife, 
 but the lives of twelve others were lost, and fifty-three others, 
 mostly women and children, subjected to the brutality of their 
 savage captors, and from which resulted all the expenditure of 
 life and property of the Cayuse war, was the direct result of 
 his extreme obstinacy and unwisdom, and indisposition to follow 
 the advice of his warm friends, McLoughlin, McKinlay and 
 McKay, who knew the Indian character better before he 
 thought of going missionarying to Oregon, than he himself 
 ever did, and but for whose interposition in his behalf, the 
 Indians would have killed him or driven him away as early as 
 October, 1841. 
 
 Before I studied the correspondence of Whitman and his as- 
 sociates, in 1887 to 1897, I wrote just as strongly in com- 
 mendation of him — even for two and a half years after I first 
 publicly demonstrated in my Peabody Institute Lectures, in 
 Baltimore, the falsity of the Whitman Saved Oregon story — 
 as these people have done who never have read that corre- 
 spondence. When the public have a chance to read that long- 
 concealed evidence, I shall be perfectly content to abide by their 
 decision as to the correctness of my estimate of the rank which 
 ought to be assigned to Marcus Whitman. 
 
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, 
 
 MARCUS WHITMAN 
 
 A DISCUSSION OF PROF. BOURNE'S PAPER 
 
 WILLIAM I. MARSHALL. 
 
 (From (he Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1900, 
 Vol. I, pages 219-236.) 
 
 WASHINGTON : 
 
 GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 
 
 1901. 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN: A DISCUSSION OF PROFESSOR BOURNE'S 
 
 PAPER. 1 
 
 By Principal William I. Marshall, of Chicago. 
 
 From 1877 to 1882 1 supposed the ' ' Whitman saved Oregon " 
 story to be true, and as a lecturer, with illustrations, on Yellow- 
 stone National Park, gold mines and gold mining, California, 
 Utah and the Mormon question, Colorado, the new West, and 
 other subjects pertaining to the scenery, industries, and his 
 tory of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast regions, appear- 
 ing in the leading popular lecture courses from Maine to Cali- 
 fornia, from 1875 to 1887, it would have been worth many 
 thousands of dollars to me, if true, as the basis of two popular 
 lectures on "Where rolls the Oregon," while, if not true, I 
 saw with equal clearness that no lectures could be prepared 
 on far-away Oregon which would pay a dollar of profit in this 
 generation. 
 
 It was while searching for evidence that would support the 
 story, so that it would be safe for me to risk my reputation 
 in advocating it, that I went to Oregon in 1882 and made a 
 pilgrimage to Whitman's grave, and learned, to my great 
 regret, from the late M. P. Deady, long United States circuit 
 judge in Oregon, that there was no real evidence to support 
 it, and that the tale was, to use his own words, "merely one 
 of old Gray's yarns." Hoping that 1 might save something 
 from the ruins of it for use on the lecture platform, I con- 
 tinued its study till 1884, and then announced, in a lecture in 
 the great Peabody Institute course, in Baltimore, Md., that 
 ' ' Whitman's ride, though a brave deed, had nothing whatever 
 to do with saving any part of Oregon, had no political pur- 
 pose nor result, but was undertaken solely on missionary 
 
 1 Prof. E. G. Bourne's paper, read at meeting of American Historical Association, Decem- 
 ber 28, 1900, is pnblished in the American Historical Review, Jannary, 1901. 
 
 221 
 
222 AMBBICAfl HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 business, and if Marcus Whitman had never been born our 
 line would have been 49 degrees to the Pacific, precisely as it 
 is to-day." 
 
 The late Hon. George Bancroft, the historian, and the final 
 authority on the Oregon question, did me the honor to read 
 the manuscript of that lecture, and wrote me, September 17, 
 1885, as follows: "Your argument is conclusive on the ques- 
 tion you discuss." 
 
 Having for the last sixteen years been a solitary voice on 
 this side the Rocky Mountains crying out against this histor- 
 ical fabrication, it is with the greatest interest that I have 
 listened to the very admirable paper of Professor Bourne. 
 
 As far back as 1888, foreseeing that unless its falsity was 
 thoroughly exposed it would soon be in the school histories, I 
 wrote to the then president of this association, offering to read 
 a paper on it, but nothing came of it. 
 
 Had it then been taken up by the association, it would never 
 have been in a single school history, nor in any other book 
 having any extensive circulation, and such a totally worthless 
 book as Barrows's " Oregon " would long since have been with- 
 drawn from sale, instead of being pushed into every library 
 to befog and mislead the American people about the true his- 
 tory of the acquisition of nearly one-twelfth of all our national 
 domain on this continent. 
 
 Professor Bourne does not do full justice to Rev. William 
 Barrows's special qualifications for and very peculiar methods 
 as the historian of "Oregon." The fact is that for six years 
 just before "throwing together" his Oregon— for it was 
 never in any proper sense written — he had his office as secre- 
 tary of the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society in the 
 same building as the American Board of Commissioners for 
 Foreign Missions — i. e., in the one building in this whole 
 world which contains, in the files of the Missionary Herald 
 from 1835 to 1848, and in something like 4,000 pages of the 
 unpublished contemporaneous letters from Dr. Whitman and 
 his associates in the Oregon mission, the indisputable evidence 
 that utterly annihilates every proposition that Barrows 
 advances as to the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride, and 
 not only did he, as Professor Bourne well says, "resist the 
 temptation to quote one word of it," but he never intimated 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN. 223 
 
 in his book that a particle of evidence on the question existed 
 there, though it seems certain that he must have known of its 
 existence. 
 
 The notion that the title to Oregon could be in any way 
 affected by an influx of English settlers is as purely imaginary 
 as all the rest of the Whitman legend, since the treaties of 
 1818 and 1 827 specifically guarded against any possibility of 
 such a result. (Cf. (a) Gallatin to Clay, Sec. of State, Nov. 
 25, 1826, Am. State Papers, Foreign Relations, Vol. VI, p. 
 653; (h) Edward Everett to Upshur, Sec. of State, two dis- 
 patches, No. 18, date Nov. 14, 1843, and No. 19, date Dec. 2, 
 1843, in Berlin Arbitration, pp. 29 and 32; (c) Calhoun, Sec. 
 of State, to Pakenham, Br. minister at Washington, Sept. 2, 
 1844; (d) Buchanan, Sec. of State, to Pakenham, July 12, 
 1845, Sen. Ex. Doc. No. 2, 29th Cong., 1st sess. ; also discus- 
 sions on Oregon in "Debates in Congress" and "Congres- 
 sional Globe," sessions of 1824-25, 1828-29, 1838-39, 1842-43, 
 1843-44, 1844-45, and 1845-46, and especially at the last session 
 two speeches of John Q. Adams, Feb. 9 and Apr. 13, 1846.) 
 
 No claim was ever made by any British plenipotentiary in 
 all our protracted negotiations on the Oregon question that 
 the British title had been or could be strengthened by any 
 settlement formed subsequent to the date of the first of these 
 treaties, viz, October 20, 1818. 
 
 Instead of ignorance and indifference about Oregon in the 
 United States, there had been for twenty years before Whit- 
 man's ride a widespread interest in it, and about no other ter- 
 ritorial acquisition we have ever made on this continent had 
 there been before its accomplishment anywhere nearly so 
 much information printed by the Government nor so many 
 popular books and magazine articles widely circulated among 
 the people as about Oregon before 1843. < 
 
 Of these books six were immediately republished in England, 
 viz: (1) Corporal Patrick Gass's Journal of the Lewis and 
 Clark Expedition, 1808. (Of this also a French edition was 
 printed in 1810.) (2) Lewis and Clark's History of the Expe- 
 dition (1814), Philadelphia, 2 volumes; London (1814), 1 vol- 
 ume; London (1815), 3 volumes; London (1817), 3 volumes. 
 In 1815 it was also translated into German and published in 
 Germany, and in 1816-1818 into Dutch and publshed in Dor- 
 drecht (in 3 volumes), and in 1817 a two-volume edition 
 
224 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 appeared in Dublin. (3) Irving's Astoria (1836). (4) Irving's 
 Bonneville (1837). (5) John K. Townsend's Narrative (1838), 
 and (6) Greenhow's History of Oregon and California, first 
 or Government edition (1840). 
 
 Within four and a half years before Whitman reached the 
 States Congress had printed for gratuitous circulation between 
 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 pages of five unanimous reports of 
 committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives 
 on Oregon, all unanimously adopted by the Senate or House 
 and all very eulogistic of the value of Oregon. 
 
 Its easy accessibility by wagons via the upper Missouri 
 route and over Clark's (or Gibbon's) Pass had been printed 
 in all the various editions of Lewis and Clark's History of 
 the Expedition, and had also been declared via the South Pass 
 route by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and by Major 
 Pilcher, and published far and wide by the National Govern- 
 ment in Senate Executive Document No. 39, Twenty -first Con- 
 gress, second session, January 25, 1831, five years before 
 Whitman went to Oregon and more than two years before 
 any missionary even thought of going there. 
 
 This document was widely copied in newspapers and maga- 
 zines, and the same facts were briefly stated in four popular 
 works on geography published between 1831 and 1835. 
 
 Two letters which Mrs. Whitman wrote while her husband 
 was getting ready to go to the States — i. e., September 29 and 
 September 30, 1842 — the first to her brother and sister at 
 Quincy, 111., and the second to her parents and brothers and 
 sisters at Angelica, N. Y. (and which were never printed 
 till 1893), seem to have escaped Professor Bourne's eye. 
 
 They are in Transactions Oregon Pioneer Association for 
 1893, pages 165-169. The following is all there is in them as 
 to cause of that braVe winter's ride. 
 
 In the first she wrote: 
 
 My Dear Jane and Edward: I sit down to write you, but in great haste. 
 My beloved husband has about concluded to start next Monday to go to 
 the United States, the dear land of our birth but I remain behind. 
 
 If you are still in Quincy, you may not see him until his return, as his 
 business requires great haste. 
 
 He wishes to reach Boston as early as possible, so as to make arrange- 
 ments to return next summer if prospered. The interests of the mission- 
 ary cause in this country calls him home. 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN. 225 
 
 In the second she wrote: 
 
 My Beloved Parents, Brothers, and Sisters: You will be surprised if 
 this letter reaches you to learn that the bearer is my dear husband, and 
 that you will after a few days have the pleasure of seeing him. May you 
 have a joyful meeting. He goes upon important business as connected 
 with the missionary cause, the cause of Christ in this land, which I will 
 leave for him to explain when you see him, because I have not time to 
 enlarge. 
 
 He has but yesterday fully made up his mind to go, and he wishes to 
 start Monday, and this is Friday. * * * He has for a companion Mr. 
 Lovejoy, a respectable, intelligent man and a lawyer, but not a Christian, 
 who expects to accompany him all the way to Boston, as his friends are in 
 that region, and perhaps to Washington. * * * He goes with the ad- 
 vice and entire confidence of his brethren in the mission, and who value 
 him not only as an associate, but as their physician, and feel as much as I 
 do that they know not how to spare him ; but the interest of the cause 
 deo umds the sacrifice on our part, and could you know all the circum- 
 stances in the case you would see more clearly how much our hearts are 
 identified in the salvation of the Indians and the interests of the cause 
 generally in this country. 
 
 The Red River settlers— twenty-three families, or eighty 
 persons in all — men, women, and children, the announcement 
 of whose coming in October, 1842, according to the "Saving 
 Oregon " legend, started Whitman to ride post haste to Wash- 
 ington to inform the Government and " Save Oregon," as a mat- 
 ter of fact, had been quietly settled in Oregon a year when 
 Whitman started to ride to the States, having been at Fort 
 Walla Walla, 25 miles from Whitman's station, October 4, 1841, 
 and Whitman knew of it within twenty-four hours, as his own 
 letter of November 11, 1841, states distinctly (in a part which I 
 have not space to quote), and instead of rushing across the con- 
 tinent to impart the information to the Government at Washing- 
 ton, or even hastening to write to the Government or anybody 
 else about it, in a two and one-half -page letter which he wrote 
 October 22, 1841, eighteen da}^s after he certainly knew that 
 they had arrived, he did not write one word about them. 
 Between the time he knew, not that they were coming, but 
 that they had arrived, i. e., October 4, 1841, and October 3, 
 1842, when he started to the States, he and his wife wrote at 
 least six letters to the States (which 1 have read), aggregating 
 about 12,000 words, out of which, in a twenty-two-page letter, 
 written November 11, 1841 (i. e., thirty-eight days after he 
 knew they had arrived), he, in illustration of something of 
 
 H. Doc. 548, pt 1 15 
 
226 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 vastly more consequence to himself, devoted the whole of 
 thirty words to the bare announcement of their arrival, but • 
 without a word of comment on it, as follows: 
 
 (A large party of settlers, as half servants to the company, were at that 
 time at the fort on their way from the Red River to settle on the Cowlitz.) 
 
 "Merely this and nothing more;" and to show how unim- 
 portant it was to him, he put these thirty words in parentheses. 
 
 Rev. II. H. Spalding's almost innumerable erroneous state- 
 ments about this matter it is charitable to ascribe to a disor- 
 dered mind and not to the intention of misrepresentation, 
 although in the record of the continuous quarrel between Mr. 
 and Mrs. Whitman and Spalding, which began before they 
 left the States (and of which there had been certainly seven 
 and probably eight or more reconciliations before they 
 received, on September 15, 1842, the destructive order of the 
 American board, dated February 25-26, 1842, which ordered 
 the discontinuance of three of the four stations of the missions 
 (including Whitman's), and ordered Gray and Spalding — i. e., 
 two out of the five men then remaining associated with the 
 mission — to return to the States, which was what caused Whit- 
 man's ride), Spalding was repeatedly charged by his associates 
 with " duplicity." 
 
 The prudential committee of the American board, when 
 they made that destructive order, had before it letters aggre- 
 gating more than 130 pages from W. H. Gray, Dr. Whitman, 
 Rev. C. Eells, Rev. A. B. Smith, and Cornelius Rogers, 
 largely filled with complaints against Spalding, and among 
 them one from Rev. A. B. Smith, of 14 pages, dated Septem- 
 ber 28, 1840, in which, after bitter complaints about Spalding, 
 he goes on as follows: 
 
 I would recommend that Mr. Spalding be recalled to the States and dis- 
 missed from the service of the board without bringing him to any trial 
 respecting his conduct here. From what I have seen and know of him I 
 greatly fear that themian will become deranged should any heavy calamity 
 befall him. These remarks I have just read to Dr. Whitman [who, it 
 must be remembered, was an M. D., and not a preacher], and he concurs 
 in what I have written, and says, moreover, that Mr. Spalding has a disease 
 in his head, which may result in derangement, especially if excited by 
 external circumstances. 
 
 His narrow escape at the time of the Whitman massacre in 
 1847 supplied the sufficient exciting cause, and it is onr* r 
 charitable to believe him irresponsible after that time. 
 
 Most legends are not born, but simply grow, and their be- 
 ginnings and authors can not be precisely determined, but 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN. 227 
 
 one of the very many peculiar features of the "Whitman 
 saved Oregon" legend is that it appeared full grown, and we 
 not only know its author, but the very date and place of its 
 first appearance. $ Twenty-three years after the event the 
 Pacific, the California organ of the Congregationalists, begin- 
 ning May 25 and ending November 9, 1865, printed 11 articles, 
 by Rev. H. H. Spalding, on the Oregon Indian missions. 
 They were full of misstatements, which can only be pardoned 
 on the ground of his mental condition, and in the tenth and 
 eleventh of these articles, October 19 and November 9, 1865, 
 appeared full grown the Whitman-saved-Oregon tale, exactly 
 as stated in what purports to be an extract from a lecture by 
 H. H. Spalding, on pages 20-23 of Senate Executive Docu- 
 ment No. 37, Forty-first Congress, third session. 
 
 Not the slightest trace of it is to be found in all the hun- 
 dreds of pages of the correspondence with the American board, 
 /between 1843 and 1865, of those who invented and pushed it 
 into circulation, viz: Rev. H. H. Spalding, W. H. Gray, Rev. 
 C. Eells, and Rev. G. H. Atkinson. They sometimes wrote of 
 Whitman as a martyr but never as an heroic patriot. 
 
 The special temptation to fabricate it, then, is to be found in 
 the fact that, under the treaty of July 1, 1863, for referring 
 to a commission their claims against the United States Gov- 
 ernment (aggregating more than 15,000,000), the Hudson 
 Bay Company and the Puget Sound Agricultural Company 
 had begun in the spring of 1865 to take testimony on the case 
 (which was finally settled by an award, September 24, 1869, of 
 $650,000 to the two companies), and it angered Spalding 
 to think that there was a chance of their getting a large part 
 of that sum, while the American board had not received a 
 cent on its extravagant claim of $40,000 for the destruction 
 of the missions at the time of the Whitman massacre, and 
 were having great trouble in securing their claims to a square 
 mile of land at each of the mission stations. 
 
 I can not agree with Professor Bourne as to Rev. C. Eells. 
 He knew all about the quarrels which had disturbed the mis- 
 sion from its start. As his letter of March 1, 1842, states 
 at the annual meeting of 1841 (when certainly the sixth, if 
 not the seventh, reconciliation was made), he had "sat from 
 six to eight hours, with few minutes' cessation, acting the 
 part of a third person between the parties, and fondly hoped 
 that a settlement was made which would be permanent, but 
 
228 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 have since been distressed to learn that if a bar was at that 
 time put up it has since been let down." Three months after 
 writing this letter he was scribe of the seventh annual meet- 
 ing of the mission, May 16 to June 8, 1842, when the seventh 
 or eighth reconciliation was had, which occupied all the time 
 of the meeting for eight days; and less than four months 
 later he was again scribe of that special meeting, September 
 26 and 27, 1842, which, after two days of indecision as to 
 what action to take on the order of the American board, dis- 
 continuing three of the four stations, finally authorized Whit- 
 man to go to the States, not on any political errand, but, as 
 the only document he took with him from the three men who 
 remained associated with him in the mission distinctly de- 
 clared, u to confer with the committee of the A. B. C. F. M. 
 in regard to the interest of this mission;" and when in his 
 letter of May 28, 1866, he first indorsed the saving Oregon 
 tale, and wrote that Whitman called that special meeting of 
 September 26-27, 1842, to consider a long-formed purpose to 
 go to the States to save Oregon, and that they discussed it for 
 two days, and that " according to the understanding of the 
 members of the mission, the single object of Dr. Whitman in 
 attempting to cross the continent in the winter of 1842-43 
 was to make a desperate effort to save this country to the 
 United States," he stated what was absolutely and unqualifiedly 
 untrue. 
 
 Ben: Perley Poore, soon after the article appeared in the 
 Atlantic, in reply to my letter of inquiry, wrote that he had 
 no personal knowledge of the matter, but had depended on 
 Spalding's and Atkinson's statements. 
 
 As to the school histories: It is now not quite two years since 
 I decided that the most practical and valuable piece of histor- 
 ical work that one of my limited ability could accomplish 
 would be to drive this stoiy from our schoolbooks, and to 
 keep it from gaining admission where not already in, and, as 
 may be seen from the following letters, that task is practically 
 accomplished with the leading ones, as soon as they can be 
 revised, and other authors will within the next six months 
 no doubt follow the example. McLaughlin's, Channing's, 
 Fiske's, Eggleston's, Ellis's and Barnes's school histories have 
 never mentioned the tale, and Dr. Eggleston, in a courteous 
 reply to my letter calling attention to a few little errors on 
 
MAKCUS WHITMAN. 229 
 
 other matters, and congratulating him that he had not been 
 misled by the Whitman legend, after thanking me for my 
 corrections, wrote: 
 
 Having been a professional student of American history from original 
 sources for twenty years, I did not need to be warned against such a fake 
 as the Whitman saved Oregon fable, which I am every now and then 
 entreated to insert. 
 
 Principal W. F. Gordy wrote me early in the summer of 
 1899: 
 
 I am entirely satisfied of the correctness of your position, and that you 
 are doing a great work for the truth of history. * * * The next edition 
 of my school history will not contain the name of Marcus Whitman. 
 
 And the edition whose preface is dated September, 1899, 
 does not. 
 
 Mrs. A. H. Burton wrote me on October 20, 1900, as 
 follows: 
 
 I shall hereafter exercise more care in my methods from having observed 
 the inexhaustible patience exercised by you in sifting out the truth. 1 
 have ordered the elimination of the name of Whitman from my history. 
 
 Though Prof. John Fiske had never mentioned Whitman 
 in his books, I knew that he had in an address at Astoria, in 
 1892, and therefore sent him the same manuscripts as Princi- 
 pal Gordy, and on July 26, 1900, he wrote me as follows: 
 
 I have read the greater part of your manuscripts with care, and it seems 
 to me that you have completely proved your case. You have entirely 
 demolished the Whitman delusion, and by so doing have made yourself a 
 public benefactor. I am sorry to say that I was taken in by Barrows and 
 Gray, and supposed what they said about Whitman to be true. In 1892 
 I was invited to deliver the centennial oration at Astoria in commemora- 
 tion of the discovery of the Columbia River. My acquaintance with the 
 history of Oregon was then but slight. I was familiar with the history of 
 American discovery along our northwest coast, having studied that subject 
 in the original sources, so that part of my oration was all right; but when 
 I came to the events of fifty years ago, having no first-hand acquaintance 
 with the sources, I trusted to Barrows and Gray, and accordingly gave my 
 audience a dose of Whitman. Among my audience was Judge Deady, who 
 afterwards informed me that all that I said about Whitman was wrong. 
 There were others who contradicted the Judge and maintained that I was 
 right. I now see, however, that the Judge was right. I feel personally 
 grateful to you for the light you have throwm upon the subject, and I am 
 very glad that I never printed anything about the Whitman business. 
 That, however, I should not have been likely to do without further exami- 
 nation of sources. You have done your work so thoroughly that it will 
 not need to be done again. 
 
230 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 I shall be very glad if you can tell me when we may hope to see your 
 essays in print. 
 
 In conclusion, you will pardon me for saying that I think the force 
 of your arguments would be enhanced if your style of expression were 
 now and then a little less vehement. I quite sympathize with your feel- 
 ing toward the humbug which you are exposing, but it seems to me 
 that there is great value in a quiet form of statement, even approaching 
 to understatement, for it gives the reader a chance to do a little swearing 
 at the enemy on his own account. 
 
 In May last Mr. D. H. Montgomery wrote me (after read- 
 ing the same manuscripts as Professor Fiske): " I am now 
 convinced that there is no satisfactory evidence that Whitman 
 came East on a political errand, and when I return from Eu- 
 rope in the autumn I shall revise my histories accordingly;" 
 and November 13, 1900, he wrote me: " You will be pleased 
 to know that I have this day rewritten the Whitman para- 
 graphs in my Leading Facts of American History and made 
 reference in a note to your valuable (forthcoming) book on 
 Fremont and Whitman;" and November 16 Mr. H. E. Scud- 
 der (who it will be remembered was the editor of Barrows's 
 " Oregon") wrote me, after only a partial examination of the 
 criticism I had sent him, as follows: " Of one thing I am cer- 
 tainly convinced, that however much force is to be given to 
 Dr. Whitman's own statement of the value he rendered, the 
 incident of his ride had no such importance as would justify 
 the space I have given it; nor is it the place of a school his- 
 tory to include matters which are in dispute, especially in such 
 a way as to imply that there is no dispute. 1 shall therefore 
 rewrite the passages in my two histories which bear upon the 
 subject;" and on November 29, 1900, Professor McMaster, 
 who had had the same manuscripts as Fiske and Montgomery, 
 wrote me as follows: 
 
 I must apologize very sincerely for the long delay in returning your 
 manuscripts and for the failure to promptly thank you for permission to 
 examine them. Delay w T as caused by a desire to read every word, and 
 with this end in view they were held till the summer vacation, when they 
 were fully and carefully read and reread. You have undoubtedly made 
 out your case. The weight of evidence seems to be against the belief 
 that Whitman rode to Washington to save Oregon, and in support of your 
 statement that his purpose was to save his mission. 
 
 The care with which you have searched far and wide for evidence is 
 admirable, and the quantity you have gathered is surprising. Thank you 
 very much for the use of the manuscripts and please pardon my shortcom- 
 ings. 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN. 231 
 
 So many people like Barrows, Nixon, Craighead, Rev. M. 
 Eells, Rev. Dr. Thomas Laurie, Dr. W. A. Mowry, and Rev. 
 Dr. Edwards have written upon this subject without knowing 
 anything about the facts, that I thought one man ought to 
 have the patience to wait till he had thoroughly mastered it 
 before rushing into print about it, but I am now ready to pub- 
 lish the "final word" on the subject. 
 
 If ever the shade of any man departed to the land of spirits // 
 has had occasion to cry out, " Save my reputation from my 
 fool friends," it is the spirit of Marcus Whitman. But for 
 their folly in trying to make a great patriotic hero out of u 
 commonplace man it would never have been necessary, as it 
 is now for the vindication of the truth of history, to spread 
 before all the world all the facts about the relations of Dr. 
 and Mrs. Whitman and their associates, especially Spalding 
 and Gray, the continual slanders, and backbiting, and fool- 
 ish quarrels about things of no real consequence, which had 
 disgraced and distracted the mission from its very start and 
 threatened it with destruction when it was not yet three years 
 old. It is without exception the most amazing story of small - 
 souled and narrow-minded folly I have ever read, especially 
 in view of the claims made for Whitman of greatness of 
 mind and lofty patriotism and intense public spirit. It was 
 these follies and not patriotism which caused Whitman's ride. 
 
 A careful examination of all the published and the unpub- 
 lished correspondence of Whitman and all his associates in 
 the Oregon Mission prior to 1843 (a matter of about 2,000 
 pages), shows that neither Whitman nor any of the rest of 
 them ever wrote in it all so much as one sentence expressing 
 the least concern about or care for the political destiny of 
 Oregon. 
 
 After Whitman had visited the States and found the whole 
 country aflame on the Oregon question (though not from any 
 acts of his) he did express in some letters some interest in 
 the matter, but not before that time. 
 
 December 7, 1857, Rev. E. Walker, who, as moderator of 
 the meetings of the mission of which Rev. C. Eells was scribe, 
 knew as much of the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride 
 as anyone, wrote of Whitman to Rev. S. B. Treat, secretary 
 of the American board, as follows: "His melancholy end 
 seemed such as to bury all his errors and mistakes in the 
 
232 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 grave with him. " There they should and would have remained 
 but for the invention of the saved Oregon fiction, with its per- 
 versions and falsifications of all the real and intensely interesting 
 history of the acquisition of the old Oregon Territory, being 
 Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and about 28,000 square miles of 
 Montana and about 13,000 square miles of Wyoming, or nearly 
 one-twelfth of our national domain on this continent. But for 
 this falsification of the history of the acquisition of that vast 
 region by the invention and dissemination of this fiction Marcus 
 Whitman, who was not above a third or fourth rate man, 
 would long since have lost all special interest for me, since 
 the true story of his life shows the correctness of what Hon. 
 Jesse Applegate (one of the real leaders of the 1843 migration) 
 wrote me of him. " Whitman acted well his part, but it was 
 not a high one. * * * He was not one to lead in a great 
 enterprise. * * * He lacked the qualities needful in a 
 leader of men." 
 
 Since writing these pages I have learned that in the Sac- 
 ramento Union of November 16, 1864, over the signature of 
 "C." (which means S. A. Clarke, then its Oregon correspond- 
 ent) there appeared the following in an account of the pro- 
 ceedings on occasion of the presentation of the tomahawk, 
 with which it was alleged Dr. Whitman was killed, to the 
 archives of Oregon. 
 
 Hon. (J. H. ?) Moores, the speaker of the Oregon assembly, 
 in the course of his remarks "Related an incident of our 
 early history never to my knowledge before given to the 
 public, and that was heard by him from the lips of the Rev. 
 Mr. Spalding, another early missionary and the coadjutor of 
 Dr. Whitman. When the Ashburton treaty was in progress, 
 news came to the little settlement in Oregon that the Govern- 
 ment was about disposing of the whole Northwest coast to 
 the English, and it made a deep impression on the mind of 
 Whitman, whose long residence had produced a sincere 
 attachment for the land of his adoption. He appreciated its 
 future value and importance, and looked upon its broad rivers 
 and fertile valleys as fields for the development of population, 
 wealth, and power. Time has realized the conjecture, which 
 he did not live to see; but he was restless, under the impres- 
 sion that his favorite region might be transferred to another 
 power, and, midwinter as it was, he undertook the dreary 
 
MARCUS WHITMAN. 233 
 
 and then dreaded journey across the plains for the sole pur- 
 pose to remonstrate against the act. Webster was Secretary 
 of State, and to him he went after hastening- to Washington, 
 and asked what was the character of the negotiations. He 
 was told that the preliminaries of the treaty were about 
 agreed upon, and his remonstrance was met with a smile. 
 
 ["Why, Doctor, you have come too late; we have about 
 traded oft' the Northwest coast for a codfishery." 
 
 " But, sir, you do not know what you are doing; you do not 
 realize that that territory you mention with a smile, almost 
 a sneer, could make a home for millions; that its broad navi- 
 gable rivers lead to an ocean whose commerce includes the 
 Indies and the empires of the Orient; that we have fine har- 
 bors and broad bays to invite that commerce thither and offer 
 an anchorage to the navies of the world. Then there are 
 beautiful and fertile valleys, whose harvests will yield eventu- 
 ally an increase to the nation's wealth." 
 
 "You are enthusiastic, Doctor," answered the Secretary, 
 with an easy smile. " You certainly are an enthusiast. The 
 reports that come to us from Oregon differ materially from 
 yours. The central portions of the continent are a barren 
 w T aste, and the waters of the western slope course through a 
 mountain wilderness or else a desert shore. The mountaineer 
 can hunt and trap there. The tourist may sketch its snow- 
 capped ridges, and describe the Indian in his native haunts. 
 The trapper finds a home there. " 
 
 "Sir, you have no idea of the land you sneer at. Oregon 
 has all the virtues we claim for it. A few Americans have 
 gone thither to develop our nation's wealth. We are far off, 
 but our hearts are with the nation of our birth. We are 
 pioneers, and can it be possible that our claims will be ignored, 
 that our country can consent to trade off her territory and 
 our allegiance to a foreign power?"] 
 
 "Dr. Whitman did not rest the question with the Secretary. 
 He visited President Tyler himself, and left no stone unturned 
 until- he had awakened an interest in his cause in the minds of 
 the President and a portion of his Cabinet, and a due consid- 
 eration of the matter induced the final preservation of the 
 greater portion of the Northwest Territory as a portion of the 
 national domain." 
 
234 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 So much of this as I have put in brackets [ J, beginning 
 with " Why, Doctor, you have come too late," and ending 
 with "and our allegiance to a foreign power," I have known 
 since 1885 was quoted on page 7 of Rev. M. Eells' pamphlet, 
 "Marcus Whitman," etc., Portland, Oreg., 1883, prefaced by 
 the statement (by Rev. M. Eells) that "They are taken from 
 the Dansville (N. Y.) Advertiser of May 4, 1865, which copied 
 them from the Sacramento Daily Bulletin." 
 
 But as I well knew there was never any such paper as the 
 Sacramento Daily Bulletin — which fact Rev. M. Eells (who 
 was born and has always lived in the old Oregon Territory) 
 ought also to have known — I supposed this to be merely 
 another of the numerous fabrications of alleged "authori- 
 ties" which have been produced by the advocates of this 
 myth, and so did not try to trace this quotation up until since 
 finding the matter in the Sacramento Union, when the editor 
 of the Dansville Advertiser, in reply to my letter of inquiry, 
 wrote me that the article appeared in his paper on May 4, 
 1865, and that it was copied from the Sacramento Union. 
 
 Concerning this Sacramento Union article it is to be noted: 
 
 (1) That except the above-noted incomplete and improperly 
 credited extract in the Dansville (N. Y.) Advertiser, it has 
 never been quoted by the advocates of the ' ' Whitman saved 
 Oregon " tale in all their voluminous writings, which is why it 
 has hitherto escaped my notice. 
 
 (2) That though explicitly declared to have been derived 
 from Rev. H. H. Spalding, it is not signed by him, and so 
 could easily have been disavowed by him and by his associ- 
 ates, if they had desired to do so, as not being an accurate 
 report of what he had said. 
 
 (3) That in the same sentence in which it is asserted that 
 the speaker of the Oregon assembly heard this tale from Mr. 
 Spalding it is explicitly declared that it had never before been 
 made public. 
 
 (4) That it gives no detailed statement that may be com- 
 pared with contemporaneous documents as to (a) the real 
 causes of Whitman's ride; (b) the date when he started; (c) 
 the route he took; (d) the dates when he was at any places on 
 the way, or when he reached the States, or when he was at 
 Washington; (e) his connection with the migration of 1843. 
 
MAKCUS WHITMAN. 235 
 
 (5) That brief and vague as it is, it contains several abso- 
 lutely false statements, all of which, except the one marked 
 (d) below, Spalding expanded and published a year later in 
 the Pacific, as follows: 
 
 (a) That the sole purpose of Whitman's ride was to protest 
 to the National Government against a proposition to trade off 
 Oregon in the Ashburton treaty ; (b) that the only cause of his 
 going was a report that Oregon was likely to be traded off in 
 that treaty; (c) that he arrived just in time, to prevent the 
 consummation of a trade of Oregon for a codfishery on the 
 banks of Newfoundland; (d) that (although it gives no dates 
 for his departure for the States or for his arrival at any point 
 on his journe} r ) it says that "it was midwinter" when he 
 undertook the journey, whereas it was early in the autumn — 
 October 3 — when he started. 
 
 (6) That four men, namely, Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. C. 
 Eells, Rev. E. Walker, and W. H. Gray, knew of their own 
 knowledge exactly what caused Whitman's ride; and that of 
 these, Rev. E. Walker, though living in Oregon till his death, 
 on November 21, 1877, never, so far as yet appears, wrote so 
 much as one sentence indorsing any form of the saving Ore- 
 gon theory of that ride, and that whatever Spalding and Gray 
 talked about it, neither of them ever ventured to write or 
 print over his own signature, so that he could be held respons- 
 ible for it, anything which claimed that Whitman's ride was 
 for any other than missionary business, till Spalding's articles 
 in the Pacific, October 19 and November 9, 1865, which arti- 
 cles contain such shameless slanders of the Hudson's Bay Com- 
 pany and the Catholic missionaries in Oregon, and such a great 
 number of statements that (if he were sane) he must have 
 known to be totally false, that one is shut up to the conclusion 
 that either he was, as 1 am charitable enough to believe, an 
 irresponsible person, or else a phenomenal and totally con- 
 scienceless prevaricator. 
 
 (7) That Rev. C. Eells never in any of his many unpublished 
 letters in the files of the American board, or in anything else 
 which has appeared in print, ever assigned anything but mis- 
 sionary business as a cause for Whitman's ride, or claimed 
 that it had produced any political effect, till his letter of May 
 28, 1866 (published in the Missionary Herald in December, 
 1866), and that as late as April, 1865, he denied to Hon. 
 
^ 
 
 23fi AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 
 
 Elwood Evans, the historian of Oregon, any knowledge of 
 anything but missionary business as impelling Whitman to 
 make that ride. 
 
 Whitman's own letters of justification written after his 
 return, in which he endeavored to defend himself from the 
 censure of the secretary of the American board for his 
 expensive disobedience to the order of the board of February, 
 1842, and in which he not only claimed all to which he was 
 really entitled, but a vast deal more, are fully discussed in my 
 " Fremont and Whitman book," and it only needs now to be 
 said that in no one of them did he claim to have interviewed the 
 President or the Secretary of State, or to have influenced in 
 any way any negotiations about Oregon, or to have held any 
 public meetings or addressed any such meetings held by 
 others and designed to promote migration to Oregon, or to 
 have printed anything in newspapers or in a pamphlet about 
 Oregon, or that his ride was intended for any such purpose, 
 but only that the two great objects of his ride were to save 
 the mission from the destruction which he himself writes in 
 these letters must have overtaken it if he had not made the 
 ride, and to lead out a migration, or, to use his precise words, 
 "It was to open a practical route and safe passage and a 
 favorable report from immigrants." 
 
 An '8-page letter of Rev. H. H. Spalding to the secretary 
 of the American board, dated as late as October, 1857 (from 
 which nothing has yet been printed), though it has much to 
 say of Dr. Whitman as a martyr and is bitterly denunciatory 
 of the Catholics, and accuses them of inciting the Whitman 
 massacre and severely arraigns the A. B. C. F. M. for not 
 recognizing the value of Whitman's labors, and for refusing 
 to "admit a line of this testimony" (i. e., "testimony" which 
 Spalding had secured of persons who averred that the "Cath- 
 olics were the promoting cause of that bloody tragedy " W. I. 
 M.), "or any part of my communications in your publica- 
 tions" does not in all its eight foolscap pages — say 2,000 to 
 2,500 words — even intimate that Whitman had had anything 
 to do with saving Oregon, or was entitled to any credit as a 
 patriot, which is sufficient proof that as late as October, 1857, 
 the ' ' Whitman Saved Oregon " fiction had not begun to take 
 shape even in Spalding's disordered mind. 
 
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