Page:Essays in Historical Criticism.djvu/73

 and 16.

designs of the Hudson's Bay Company and the first to report those designs to the Government at Washington, whereby the territory which now includes the States of Oregon, Wash- ington, and a part of Idaho was saved to our country." ^

On that November 28 the labors of the obscure a^d for- gotten missionary, Henry H. Spalding, attained their cul- mination, and from hundreds of pulpits and to hundreds of thousands of readers during that month went forth his story of How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.

The coronation of the work was the vote for the Hall of Fame, two years later.

Rising obscurely in the columns of local papers, spreading slowly in missionary channels, the stream gathers volume and headway, successfully defeats all effort to arrest its course and rolls onward, until, in its particular province in American History, it has washed away landmarks and altered the face of the country. Whether the stream can be returned to its own channel and the history of the Oregon question be restored to its original outlines as they existed before 1865 is open to question. In one of his early articles the Reverend William Barrows after a highly imaginative picture of Whitman's interview with Webster remarked: —

"In a century or so that scene will furnish one of the grandest historical paintings of North America, Webster, Whitman, and Oregon : it will take about a century to clear the foreground of a thousand other men and petty scenes."

It has really taken only about fifteen years. The fore- ground is already clear of Wyeth and Kelly, of Jason Lee and Samuel Parker, of Senators Linn and Benton, and other protagonists of Oregon. The ambition of some of the present apostles of the Legend is higher still. One of them, the Hon. J. Wilder Fairbank, who delivers an illustrated lecture on The Ride that Saved an Empire^ concludes this effort with

1 The Outlook, Dec. 4. The celebration in Washington took place Dec. 9, and the meeting was addressed by Rev. Dr. Newman, Justice Brewer, and Gen. O. O. Howard. In Philadelphia a memorial to Whitman was dedicated Nov. 29. The serai-centennial was also celebrated at Walla Walla, where a monument was erected. See Whitman College Quarterly, Dec. 1897.