Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/120

 236 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION.

Elwood Evans, the historian of Oregon, any knowledge of anything but missionan' business as impelling Whitman to make that ride.

Whitman's own letters of justification written after his return, in which he endeavored to defend himself from the censure of the secretary of the American board for his expensive disobedience to the order of the board of February, 18tfc2, and in which he not only claimed all to which he was |

really entitled, but a vast deal more, are fully discussed in my " Fremont and Whitman book," and it only needs now to be said that in no one of them did he claim to have interviewed the President or the Secretary of State, or to have influenced in any way any negotiations about Oregon, or to have held any j

public meetings or addressed any such meetings held by I

others and designed to promote migration to Oregon, or to have printed anything in newspapei-s or in a pamphlet about j

Oregon, or that his ride was intended for any such purpose, i

but only that the two great objects of his ride were to save the mission from the destruction which he himself writes in |

these letters must have overtaken it if he had not made the i

ride, and to lead out a migration, or, to use his precise words, "It was to open a practical route and safe passage and a favorable report from immigrants."

An 8-page letter of Rev. H. H. Spalding to the secretary of the American board, dated as late as October, 1857 (from

which nothing has yet been printed), though it has much to say of Dr. Whitman as a martyr and is bitterly denunciatory j

of the Catholics, and accuses them of inciting the Whitman massacre and severely arraigns the A. B. C. F. M. for not recognizing the value of Whitman^s labors, and for refusing to "admit a line of this testimony" (i. e., "testimony" which Spalding had secured of persons who averred that the "Cath- olics were the promoting cause of that bloody tragedy" W. I. M.), "or any part of my communications in your publica- tions" does not in all its eight foolscap pages — say 2,(K)0 to 2,500 words — even intimate that Whitman had had anything to do with saving Oregon, or was entitled to any credit as a patriot, which is sufficient proof that as late as October, 1857, the "Whitman Saved Oregon" fiction had not begun to take shape even in Spalding's disordered mind.

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