Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/29

Rh If the reader will now turn to Whitman's letters of May 12, 27, 28 and 30, 1843 (pp. 37-8 infra.), he will discover exactly how much (or rather how very little) was Whitman's interest in leading a migration to Oregon at the very time when it was gathering and starting.

Presumably (though he has not accurately quoted this letter) Dr. Mowry knows its contents, and presumably also he knows perfectly well the contents of Mrs. Whitman's letter of April 14, 1843 (quoted on p. 17 ante, but), to which he does not allude. Yet, notwithstanding Whitman in this one explicitly declares that the mission would have been broken up "just then" if he had not made the ride, and Mrs. Whitman wrote, "There was no other way for us to do, we felt that we could not remain, as we was without more help, and we were so far off that to send by letter was too slow a way for the present emergency." Dr. Mowry (carefully suppressing this strictly contemporaneous evidence of the two people who knew best about the urgency of the mission business in causing Whitman to make his winter's ride]) says (p. 131), "But if this" (i. e., the business of the mission) "was the only motive for that hazardous journey, why should he not have waited until spring? It seems quite clear that a summer trip across the continent would have accomplished that end just as well," and (p. 188), "Had his purpose been confined solely to the affairs of the mission he could have waited until spring, and made the journey during the summer months."

Three indispensable postulates of Dr. Mowry's claim that Whitman "wrested that entire country" (i. e., the old Oregon Territory) "from the Hudson's Bay Company" are:

First. That as late as March, 1843, that "entire country" i. e., the present states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, together with about 28,000 square miles of Northwestern Montana and about 13,000 square miles of Northwestern Wyoming, in all about 292,000 square miles, or nearly one-twelfth of all our territory on this continent, was in controversy between the United States and Great Britain.

Yet knowing perfectly well that in 1824 and again in 1827 England offered us the line of 49 degrees to the most northeastern branch of the Columbia, and thence the river to the Pacific, which left really in dispute not "that entire country," but only about 55,000 to 58,000 square miles, or less than one-fifth of "that entire country," being only that part of Washington north and west of the Columbia, and that we both times immediately refused this offer and insisted on 49 degrees to the Coast, Dr. Mowry deems it consistent with his duty as an "impartial historian" to suppress all mention of