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Rh now reinforced by the independent appearance of the story in several works of authority. The engagement of Dr. Atkinson to write the historical part of the article on Oregon in the Encyclopcedia Britannica secured its insertion there, and, relying partly on Von Hoist and Barrows, Lyon G. Tyler gave it recognition with some criticism and correction in his Letters and Times of the Tylers. Likewise following Barrows and Gray, J. P. Dunn, Jr., the author of the volume on Indiana in the Commonwealth Series, incorporated the story in his Massacres of the Mountains. The year following (1887) Samuel Adams Drake adopted in his Making of the Great West the legendary account of the cause of Whitman's journey, but passed by in discreet silence his political influence. He attributed to him the organization of the emigration of 1843.

In 1889 the influence of Barrows is manifest in securing Whitman nearly a column in the Dictionary of American Biography. The mention in the articles on Oregon in the American supplement to the Britannica, and in the International Cyclopaedia, and the sketch in Bliss' Encyclopaedia of Missions, may also be attributed to the same source. In this same period the legend appears in two church histories of accepted authority.