Edward Gaylord Bourne

“ If the doctor could establish a wagon route through the mountains to the Columbia River, pronounced impossible by Governor Simpson and Ashburton, he would use his influence to hold on to Oregon. The great desire of the doctor's American soul, Christian withal, that is, the pledge of the President that the swapping of Oregon with England for a cod-fishery should stop for the present, was attained, although at the risk of his life, and through great sufferings, and unsolicited, and without the promise or expectation of a dollar's reward from any source. ”

“ The sturdy manliness and Christian devotion of Marcus Whitman, the unceasing labors of his life and his death in the service of Christian missions in Oregon, fully deserve every honorable memorial. The perversion of history cannot honor such a man. ”

“ I am a missionary, it is true, but my country needs me now." And taking leave of his missionary associates, his comfortable home, and his weeping companion, with little hope of seeing them again in this world, he entered upon his fearful journey the 2d of October 1842, and reached the City of Washington the 2d of March 1843, with his face, nose, ears, hands, feet, and legs badly frozen. It is well that the good man did not live to see himself and his faithful associates robbed and their character slandered by that very Government he was ready to lay down his life for. ”

“ The story first emerges over twenty years after the events and seventeen years after Whitman's death and its conception of the Oregon policy of the government is that handed down by tradition in an isolated and remote community. Criticism of a simple type has winnowed out some of the crudest misconceptions, unconscious that more is needed to substantiate a narrative than to sift out its impossibilities. ”

“ Incidental or collateral assumptions usually accompany this statement to the effect that great ignorance and indifference in regard to Oregon prevailed in Washington and generally throughout the United States, and that Dr. Whitman was able to dispel the ignorance and to transform the indifference into a deep and widespread interest. In both the essentials and the explanatory details the story of how Marcus Whitman saved Oregon is fictitious. It is not only without trustworthy contemporary evidence, but is irreconcilable with well established facts. ”

“ I can not give you much of an account of the emigrants until we get on the road. It is said that there are over two hundred men besides women and children. They look like a fair representation of a country population. ... We do not ask you to become the patrons of emigration to Oregon, but we desire you to use your influence that in connexion with all the influx into this country there may be a good proportion of good men from our own denomination who shall avail themselves of the advantages of the country in common with others. ”

“ America is too late, and we have got the country." Whitman realizes that if Canadian immigration has really begun the authorities at Washington ought to know it, and a counter American immigration ought to be promoted, so that when the joint occupation of Oregon is terminated, the presence of a majority of American settlers may turn the balance in favor of the United States by right of possession. The government must be informed as to the value of Oregon and its accessibility by overland emigration. ”

“ Lovejoy's recollection shows not a trace of the Spalding legend of Whitman's having arrived in the nick of time to save Oregon from being "traded off for a cod fishery." Every account that has been published of Whitman's interviews with Tyler and Webster except this of Lovejoy is entirely fictitious, and not only fictitious but impossible, and could have originated only with a man ignorant of diplomacy in general and of the Oregon diplomacy in particular. ”

“ Calling attention to the Catholic missionary efforts, for which he refers the committee to De Smedt's Indian Sketches, he continues, "I think by a careful consideration of this together with these facts and movements you will realize our feelings that we must look with interest upon this the only spot on the Pacific Coast left where protestants have a present hope of a foothold. It is requisite that some good pious men and ministers go to Oregon without delay as citizens or our hope there is greatly clouded, if not destroyed." ”

“ On November 1 he wrote from the Fort Walla Walla: "my journey across the mountains was very much prolonged by the necessity for me to pilot the emigrants. I tried to leave the party, at different points, and push forward alone, but I found that I could not do so without subjecting the emigrants to considerable risk." Then follows a plea for more help from the mission board:
"We very much need good men to locate themselves two, three or four in a place and secure a good influence for the Indians, and form a nucleus for religious institutions, and keep back Romanism. ”

“ To trace the steps by which the imaginative reconstruction of this transaction, strangely distorting the relative significance of men and events, has slowly but steadily pushed aside the truth, until it has invaded not only the text-books but the works of historians whose reputation gives their utterances a certain authority, would give every one a new idea of the pervasive and subtle power of the legendary faculty of the human mind and of the need of unceasing critical vigilance. ”

“ Whitman's journey to the East was the decision of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to discontinue the southern branch of the mission, and his purpose was to secure a reversal of that order, and reinforcements from the Board, and to bring back, if possible, a few Christian families. The rapidly increasing immigration into Oregon made an increase of Protestant missions essential if Oregon was to be saved from becoming Catholic. ”

“ The stopping of wagons at Fort Hall was a Hudson Bay Company scheme to prevent the settling of the country by Americans, till they could settle it [p. 21] with their own subjects from the Selkirk settlement. This news spread like fire through Missouri, as will be seen from Zacrey's statement. The doctor pushed on to Washington and immediately sought an interview with Secretary Webster—both being from the same State—and stated to him the object of his crossing the mountains, and laid before him the great importance of Oregon to the United States. ”

“ The real Oregon policy of the administration was something very different from Spalding's invention. It was to yield to England the territory north of the Columbia if England would acquiesce in or promote our acquisition of California from San Francisco harbor northward and the annexation of Texas to the United States. English influence was strong in Mexico and it was believed that if England urged these concessions on Mexico she would grant them for a reasonable consideration. ”

“ Whitman found that many of the now old Oregonians—Waldo, Applegate, Hamtree, Keyser, and others—who had once made calculations to come to Oregon, had abandoned the idea because of the representations from Washington that every attempt to take wagons and ox teams through the Rocky Mountains and Blue Mountains to the Columbia had failed. ”

“ The ignorance and indifference of the government and the public are fictions of a later day.
In such investigation of the newspapers as I have been able to make I have found just one news item about Whitman's journey East, outside of the missionary intelligence of two or three religious papers which refer to his visit to Boston. Whitman called on Horace Greeley in the last part of March and gave him some account of the conditions in Oregon and of his journey. ”

“ We told him it would be a miracle if he escaped death either from starving or freezing, or the savages, or the perishing of his horses, during the five months that would be required to make the only possible circuitous route, via Fort Hall, Taos, Santa Fé, and Bent Fort. His reply was that of my angel wife six years before: "I am ready, not to be bound only, but to die at Jerusalem or in the snows of the Rocky Mountains for the [p. 20] name of the Lord Jesus or my country. ”

“ He impressed Greeley as a "noble pioneer, ... a man fitted to be a chief in rearing a moral Empire among the wild men of the wilderness. ... He brings information that the settlers in the Willamette are doing well, that the Americans are building a town at the falls of the Willamette." Then follows an item in regard to members of Farnham's party and Whitman's itinerary. "We give the hardy and self-denying pioneer a hearty welcome to his native land." ”

“ Doing more for the civilisation and social improvement of the Indians than the mission can do unaided. 5. It would afford facilities for religious families to go into the country and make immediately a comfortable settlement, with the enjoyment of Christian privileges,—both those who might be introduced upon the lands now occupied by the mission and others who might be induced to go, and settle in the vicinity of the stations. ”

“ The interesting thing is that the Zachrey letter supplies the materials for this report of Whitman's conversation with Tyler. As the statement was not true in either case, the most natural conclusion is that Spalding invented it and inserted it in the text of the Zachrey letter. The rest of the Zachrey letter probably represents the coalescence after twenty-three years in Zachrey's memory of what Whitman did on the way for the emigrants with the indistinct recollection of the inducements to start. ”

“ Some young men are now returning with the expectation of bringing out a party next Spring." [60] That Whitman may have urged individuals to join the emigration is likely enough, and is affirmed by Lovejoy, but he had no time to do more, and they would not have had time to get ready unless they had begun before his arrival. The legendary account of Whitman's relation to the emigration of 1843 has been supported by a letter published by Spalding from John Zachrey, one of the emigrants of 1843, who wrote in 1868 that his father was influenced to go to Oregon by "a publication by Dr. ”

“ We cannot feel it at all just that we are doing nothing while worldly men and papists are doing so much. De Smedt's business in Europe can be seen, I think, at the top of the 23d page of his Indian Sketches, etc. ”

“ The earliest testimony we have on this point is Gray's letter to the American Board from Waiilatpu, October 14, 1840. "Duplicity is a trait in his character that never in all probability will change." [20] The most conclusive proof of Spalding's untrustworthiness if not dishonesty in matters relating to this missionary history can be given. While Dr. Whitman was absent from his mission on his journey east in 1842-1843 his mill was burned by the Indians. ”

“ It is reprinted in Nixon's How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon, p. 146–163. Applegate says, "Whitman's great experience and indomitable energy were of priceless value to the emigrating column. ... To no other individual are the emigrants of 1843 so much indebted for the successful conclusion of their journey as to Marcus Whitman," p. 131–132. Cf. Burnett's Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer, N. Y., 1880, "Dr. Whitman, who had performed much hard labor for us and was deserving of our warmest gratitude," p. ”

“ The only evidences of such intentions that I have found, that are uncontaminated by Spalding's fictions, are a reference in Dr. White's letter of April 1, 1843, [30] to the Indian Commissioner at Washington, and A. L. Lovejoy's recollections as given in his letter to Dr. Atkinson in 1876. Lovejoy came to Oregon in the emigration of 1842 and was induced to return with Whitman. He writes ”

“ Hines's narrative is based on his diary at the time. ↑ Cf. Bancroft, Oregon, I. 390 ff. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that Whitman never pretended that he organized the emigration. In his letter to the Secretary of War, received June 22, 1844, he wrote: "The Government will now doubtless for the first time be apprised through you, or by means of this communication, of the immense immigration of families to Oregon which has taken place this year. I have, since our interview, been instrumental in piloting ... no less than three hundred families," etc. ”

“ All that needs to be said is that Poore spent the years 1841–1848 in Europe and the East! ↑ See Nixon, p. 315. ↑ Gray's Oregon, p. 326. I use the earlier letter this time, the only essential difference between the two being a parenthetical statement that Congress was in session when Whitman arrived, which is a mistake and may be an explanatory afterthought of Lovejoy's. ↑ Lord Palmerston said in the House of Commons, March 21, "if that bill passed into a law, an event which he conceived to be impossible, it would amount to a declaration of war." ”

“ He would not have expressed himself in this way if his achievement had been the fulfillment of his pledge to Tyler to organize and conduct such a company. ↑ Cf. Parrish's statement in Bancroft, I. 177. ↑ In Hastings's Emigrant Guide to Oregon and California, etc., Cincinnati, 1845, emigrants are cautioned not to leave Independence later than May 1. I. 147. ↑ All these letters are in the letter-book, "Oregon Indians." ”