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28 At the time of the Whitman massacre Spalding had undergone a terrible nervous and physical strain from which apparently he never recovered.

He believed the massacre had been instigated by the Catholic missionaries, and this belief made him almost if not quite a monomaniac on the subject of Catholicism. He charged the Catholic missionaries repeatedly with having instigated the massacre. These charges were echoed by others, and in their morbid imaginations, behind the scenes, as the concealed prime movers of the tragedy, stood the Hudson's Bay Company, vindictive at the loss of Oregon through the activity of the missionaries. A fierce controversy arose whose embers are still smouldering. The Vicar-General of Walla Walla, the Reverend J. B. A. Brouillet, prepared a reply to these charges which was published in New York in 1853, and later in 1858 was included by J. Ross Browne, a special agent of the Treasury Department, in a report which