Page:Essays in Historical Criticism.djvu/60

 words, which were not answered, and we felt that we had gained the victory."

The feeling was justified by the event. The real spread of the Legend and its acceptance by scholars of reputation dates from the period of this controversy. That this should be the case is surprising and at first sight perplexing. The explanation, however, is very simple and not at all creditable to American historical scholarship or critical discernment.

During the progress of this controversy the Rev. William Barrows, a Congregational clergyman, who forty years earlier was living in St. Louis and had seen Whitman at the time of his arrival there in February 1843, published a series of articles on the history of Oregon in the New York Observer, which later, in a revised form, constituted a considerable part of the text of his Oregon: The Struggle for Possession, which was published in December, 1883, by Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., in the American Commonwealth Series, edited by Horace E. Scudder.

Although Dr. Barrows lived near Boston he seems to have successfully withstood the temptation, which would perhaps have proved irresistible to the ordinary historian, to consult the records of the American Board or even their printed Reports and the files of the Missionary Herald, He chose rather to draw from such turbid sources as Spalding's Executive Document 37 and Gray's History. One of their fables, e. g., the presence of Sir George Simpson in Washington, he rejects with engaging candor, only to insert it five times within fifty pages. Barrows' book is constructed without method, is bewildering and repetitious to the last degree, intermingling inextricably perversions of fact with pure fictions, and enormously distorting the history of the Oregon question by making it turn mainly on the activities of the small group of missionaries of the American Board and of Whitman in particular. It was a favorite theme with Mr.