Page:Essays in Historical Criticism.djvu/64

 Following Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin, another successful writer of boys' books, Hezekiah Butterworth, gave the legend prominence in his tale, The Log School-House by the Columbia, and made it the subject of a poem from which a selection may be quoted as a curiosity:

In this review of the literature of the Legend of Marcus Whitman we now pass to the jesiv 1895, the date of the publication of the first professed biographies. In that year the Rev. J. G. Craighead, for many years one of the editors of the New York Evangelist, who had been familiar with the story since 1870 and had in vain devoted weeks to the effort to authenticate the part of it describing Whitman's work in Washington, published his Story of Marcus Whitman: Early