Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/16

10 and evasion and special pleading indicated by his above quoted letter, or in accord with the universally accepted canons of honest historical investigation and writing, by which all real historians feel bound to work.

There are no letters in the correspondence of Whitman and his associates with the American Board, which, since the endorsement of the Whitman Saved Oregon Story, by the Missionary Herald, the official organ of that Board, in December, 1866, can with any propriety be considered as private or confidential, the public having an undoubted right to know the contents of all that correspondence in order that it may correctly judge of the validity of the claims made about Marcus Whitman, and of the credence it should give to the "statements" of Messrs. Spalding, Gray and C. Eells (from twenty-three to forty years after 3ie event), on which alone the Whitman Saved Oregon Story rests.

No attempt was made by the Secretary of the American Board to limit the freedom and thoroughness of my investigations.

In his Preface, after informing us that he has been more than twenty years investigating the Whitman Saved Oregon subject, and that he has read "Everything I could lay my hands upon," Dr. Mowry says: "This book is a history. It is not an embellished story like Irving's Astoria or Parkman's Oregon Trail. It was written with the single purpose of stating in a clear and concise manner the important facts with which it has to deal. From first to last it has to do with facts."

On page 114 he says: "It should be the aim of the impartial historian to examine all sides of a disputed question, to sift all statements, to examine all theories, to go, as far as possible, to the original sources for his facts, and, free from bias or prejudice to state only that which appears to be thoroughly corroborated as truth."

Let us compare his performance with this correct statement of his duty.

He says (p. 1): "At one time our government ignored the country" (i. e.. Oregon) "as worthless, and was not unwilling to sell it for a mess of pottage." (P. 2): "Finally the savages were permitted to butcher in cold blood the man who, by bravery and patriotism utterly .unprecedented, wrested that entire country from the gfrasp of the Hudson's Bay Company, and made it possible for the United States to hold it." (pp. 170-71, writing of the spring of 1843, and of Webster's and Tyler's ideas of Oregon): "It was plainly apparent that Lord Ashburton, Sir George Simpson and others, with British proclivities, had thoroughly indoctrinated our statesmen with the idea that the Rocky Mountains were impassable to wagons, that Oregon could not be peopled from the States, and there-