Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/454



Washington and Boston, accompanied by a single companion. Crossing the mountains at any season of the year in those days was a serious undertaking; entered upon at the edge of winter it was perilous, and for any object but one of supreme importance and urgency, foolhardy. Undertaken as it was with Whitman's full knowledge of its difficulties and perils and with his conception of the interests at stake, it was heroic.

Whitman's one companion on this perilous ride was A. L. Lovejoy, a young lawyer who had arrived in Oregon with the immigration of that year. They reached Fort Hall without serious difficulty, but here they found their way over the direct route barred by the snows of an early winter. Not discouraged by this, Whitman procured a guide, and he and his companion turned soiTthward, keeping along the western base of the Rocky mountains, to the Santa Fe trail, and thence eastward to St. Louis where Whitman, having left Lovejoy on the way to return by way of Fort Hall to Oregon, arrived in February after a jour- ney of four months of incredible hardships and privation and peril. From St. Louis he hastened on to Washington, stopping briefly in Cincinnati on the way. From Washington he went to Boston by way of New York. The date of his visit to Washing-ton is not fixed, but it is certain that he was in New York, March 28, and a day or two later was on the steamer on the sound bound for Boston, and that he was in Boston the first week in April. His stay at his home after leaving Boston must have been brief, for he was back in St. Louis early in May on his return to Oregon, in less than three months from the time of his arrival there on his eastward journey.

Finding the emigration somewhat delayed in setting out, lie visited rela- tives in Quincy, Illinois, then went to the Shawnee mission in the neighbor- hood of the rendezvous from which immigrants for Oregon were accustomed to start. On May 17, he was visited here by a committee of emigrants appointed for that purpose, and on the 20th attended a meeting of the committee ap- pointed to draw up the rules and regulations for the journey.

The emigration started on the 22nd under Captain Gantt, a man experienced in the route as far as Fort Hall, who had been employed to pilot the company to that point. Whitman remained at the Shawnee mission for some days and joined the emigrants on the Platte river about the middle of June, and continued with it to Fort Hall. During this part of the route he traveled for the most part with Jesse Applegate, who after the division of the emigrants was captain of one of the divisions. This division was generally in advance, as appears from the diary of J. W. Nesmith, who was made orderly-sergeant of the company as first organized. It was perhaps while traveling with this division in advance that Whitman obtained information from the Catholic missionaries, who were somewhat in advance of the immigration, of a shorter route by Fort Bridger, known afterwards as the Fort Bridger cut-off. Of this Peter H. Burnett wi'ites : "On the 12th of August we were informed that Dr. Whitman had written a let- ter, stating that the Catholic missionaries had discovered by the aid of their Flathead Indian pilot a pass through the mountains by way of Fort Bridger, which was shorter than the old route. We therefore determined to go by the fort. On the 14th we arrived at Fort Bridger, situated on the Black's fork of Green river, having traveled from our camp on the Sweetwater two hundred and nineteen miles in eighteen days. Here we overtook the missionaries."