Dr. Marcus Whitman

“ His constant advice was travel, travel, travel ; nothing else will take you to the end of your journey. His great authority as a physician saved as many ruinous delays; and it is no disparagement to others to say that to no other individual are the immigrants of 1843 so much indebted for the successful conclusion of their journey as to Dr. Marcus Whitman." There is more to the same import. Just read again Mrs. Victor's ridicule of "Whitman having anything to do with the great immigration in 1843, and then compare it with this plain statement of one of Oregon's most honored pioneer patriots. ”

“ This has been accomplished through contribution of money by some twelve residents of Oregon and Washington, who saw the need of bringing to fruition the life work of Professor Marshall. This effort, headed by C. B. Bagley of Seattle, has been entirely successful.
Whitman Needs No False Glory.
Dr. Marcus Whitman needs no false glory; nor does the missionary cause which did great things for Oregon; neither does Whitman College—an ever growing monument to this patriot hero. Dr. Whitman will be an everlasting figure in Oregon annals; always will be honored by the gratitude of our people. ”

“ Marcus Whitman, judged by his life as a Missionary, must ever be given due credit; for no man ever gave evidence of greater devotion to the work he found to do. He was doubtless excelled as a teacher of the Indians by many of his co-laborers. He was not, perhaps, even eminent as a teacher. His great reputation and the honor due him, does not rest upon such a claim, but upon his wisdom in seeing the future of the Great West, 244 and his heroic rescue of the land from a foreign rule. ”

“ He at once visited Dr. Pearsons, thanked him for his generous offer, and set about his task of raising the money. The difficulty was in getting a start. On June 20, 1895, the book "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon" was published in Chicago, and on the Fourth of July, Sunday, two weeks later, forty ministers in Chicago and neighboring places took Marcus Whitman as a patriotic text. Many of them took up collections for the memorial college, and the Congregational Club gave its check for one thousand dollars. ”

“ Make it worthy of the man whose love of country felt that no task was too difficult and no danger so great as to make him hesitate.
After the endowment is full and complete, a great College Hall should be erected from a patriotic fund, and upon the central pillar should be inscribed: "Sacred to the memory of Dr. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. While lifting up the banner of the cross in one hand to redeem and save savage souls, they thought it no wrong to carry the flag of the country they loved in the other." ”

“ In 1843 he founded what is now the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University where he ended his teaching and where he died in 1867.
It was repeatedly said by his colleagues that he was the best medical teacher in the United States. He was personally of equally high standing. Of the highest degree of morality and integrity, benevolent, deeply religious, and with high ideals, he was the pride of every community in which he lived.
On January 29, 1832, Marcus Whitman received the degree of doctor of medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York. ”

“ The characters are before us, they had met in consultation—Marcus Whitman, the man with frosted hands and feet, dressed in furs and buckskin, who had so loved his country that he had braved the winter storms, and over unknown ways, without pay or hoped-for honors or rewards, had come four thousand five hundred miles to plead for Oregon to be placed under the flag. There was the President, the nation's chief; John Tyler, dignified, clear-eyed, honest, earnest, and as he proved, sympathetic and anxious to do his whole duty to the nation ”

“ It was in this environment of scholarship, with the oversight of an excellent teacher, and in association with other boys of capability and ambition coming from a wide area, that Marcus Whitman developed the ambition to rise above the intellectual level of his direct ancestry and become a professional man. Since the major influence in the school was toward the ministry it was natural that Marcus Whitman's early ambition tended toward that career. ”

“ In Rushville, New York, the town of Marcus Whitman's birth and of his residence from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-three, there was a single village physician. He was Dr. Ira Bryant. Of his high qualities as a man, and his skill as a physician through thirty-five years of practice there is abundant record. It is probable, although not certain, that he never attended a medical college.
Dr. Ira Bryant was both as a man and a physician a favorable influence upon Marcus Whitman. When they came into the relation of preceptor and student Dr. ”

“ There are men who, with great incentives, have accomplished great things, but were utter failures when it came to practical, every-day duties. Dr. Whitman, with a genius to conceive, and the will and energy to carry out the most difficult and daring undertaking, was just as faithful and efficient in the little things that made up the comforts of his wilderness home. Seeing these grand results—the commodious house, the increase in the herds and the stacks of grain—seems to have only angered his lazy, thriftless Indians, and they began to make demands for a division of his wealth. ”

“ Yet it is the true Marcus Whitman whom they wish to honor, the devoted and heroic missionary who braved every hardship and imperilled his life for the cause of Christian missions and Christian civilization in the far Northwest and finally died at his post, a sacrifice to the cause, and not a political deus ex machina, a figment of H. H. Spalding's invention. ”

“ What could have been grander work for any Christian man than Whitman's brave part in saving the whole great territory to the Union? Patriotism is a part of Christianity, and an important part. That man is a feeble Christian who does not love his home and fatherland.
The American Board never claimed, or received, a moiety of the reward deserved, because of its [168] poor estimate of the great work done at that time by its servants. Well did Dr. Frank Gunsaulus say:
"Marcus Whitman was more to the ulterior Northwest than John Harvard has ever been to the Northeast of our common country." ”

“ It would not have done for Whitman to have waited for next year and warm weather as his friends demanded. "I must go," and "now," and at this day it is easy to see from the light of history how God rules in the minds and hearts of men, as he rules nations. They, as men and nations, turn aside from His commands, but a man like Marcus Whitman obeys.
Go still farther. From the time gold was discovered in California up to the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion, nine hundred millions of gold were dug from the mines of California and Oregon. ”

“ 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 historians that one accustomed to reading books whose authors summarize fairly, and quote honestly and accurately the authorities 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. ”

“ It is unfortunate that persons who have shown most commendable eal in clipping and preserving scraps of historic worth, have often failed to properly label their clippings, thus greatly impairing their value for reference, and making them bibliographically worthless.
Few, if any, in the list of American heroes, have been more variously estimated than Marcus Whitman. For twenty years before Professor Bourne called the attention of Eastern historians to the saved Oregon story, the question of Whitman's political influence was being debated in Oregon and Washington. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Whitman critics say there is no evidence that Whitman ever saw Presi- dent Tyler or Secretary of State Webster on the Oregon question. But there is evidence that Whitman did visit Washington City for some purpose. And there is no evidence that he did not see both of those officials. Marcus Whitman was not an idle gadder-about. His time was too precious. His life was too serious; his work in Oregon was too great for any trifiing of time or opportun- ities. Many of the greatest feats of public service are never heralded to the world. ”

“ Mowry has written all the rest of the book on the same lines as the parts herein criticized, after this examination of his treatment of every important original source, it seems unnecessary 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 "history," and that "from first to last it deals with facts," and very positively denies that it is "an embellished story." ”

“ Fifty-two years later, in the most careful appraisal of human achievement in America that has ever been made, the voting for the Hall of Fame at New York University, Marcus Whitman received nineteen out of a possible ninety-eight votes to be ranked as one of the fifty greatest Americans. ”

“ Thus on May 9, 1826, Marcus Whitman, not yet twenty-four years of age, became a legal practitioner in the state of New York. The law then prescribed that a man must have studied medicine three years before he could be licensed; therefore this document is proof that Marcus Whitman studied under his preceptor, Dr. ”

“ And so Marcus Whitman on his twenty-first birthday saw the possibility of satisfying his suppressed but not dead ambition for further study and entrance into a profession of service, a profession no less worthy than that of the ministry, toward which his mind had been directed by the associations of his school days in western Massachusetts. ”

“ Whitman's diary will notice how she avoids saying anything to excite comment regarding the purposes of his winter visit to Washington. In her letter to her father and mother she simply says: "I expect my dear husband will be so full of his great work that he will forget to tell you of our life in Oregon. He can explain what it is," etc.
It is said "Women cannot keep a secret," but here is an instance of one that did. In his absence she visited Fort Vancouver, Astoria, Oregon City, and other points. She is painstaking in keeping a regular record of every-day events. ”

“ Whitman stopped among the Cayuse Indians. And commenced their labors at a place since called Waiilatpu, situated twenty-five miles east of Ft. Walla Walla.—The missionary work was prosecuted rather steadily among the Cayuse, Nez Percés, and Spokane Indians till 1847. On the 29th of November of that year. Dr. and Mrs. Whitman met a violent death at the hands of the Cayuse Indians." [14] If Cushing Eells knew at this time that Marcus Whitman saved Oregon to the United States in 1843 it would have been a fitting occasion upon which to mention it. ”

“ As these negotiations of Governor Simpson in Washington and Whitman's success in frustrating them are the very heart and life of the legend of Marcus Whitman, [131] without which it would never have come to anything, and as they are a pure invention, one of three conclusions is forced upon us. Either this story was invented by Marcus Whitman himself and reported years afterward by Spalding and Eells, or it was invented in common by Spalding and Eells, or Spalding invented it and Eells copied it from him. The last is, I believe, the true solution. ”

“ Marcus Whitman rode the byways of rural Steuben County, New York, in 1832 and 1834, and as he discussed cholera with his professional colleagues wherever he met them, little did he imagine that he was preparing himself to meet the first great emergency in his part in the settlement of old Oregon. He had learned the treatment that succeeded in cases taken early in robust men, and all the members of the caravan were robust. None other would be engaged. ”

“ The real history of Marcus Whitman is briefly as follows: Sent out as a missionary to the Oregon Indians in 1836, he established a prosperous station which proved a haven of rest for the weary emigrant and traveller. In 1842 he is ordered to give up the station, but at the very time when the orders come a large emigration party arrives much reduced by the hardships of the journey from Fort Hall. Their leader, Dr. White, announces that the United States are going to occupy the country and that many are preparing to come the following year. ”

“ Why should the great historian of the Pacific States stand above their martyr graves and attempt to discredit their lives and dishonor their memories? Dr. Whitman exhibited as much patriotism and performed as grand an act of heroism as any man of this century, and yet, Mr. Bancroft devotes half a dozen volumes to "The Chronicle of the Builders," in which he presents handsome photographs and clear, well-written sketches of hundreds of men, but they are mainly millionaires and politicians. The historian seems to have had no room for a Missionary or a poor Doctor. ”