Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/32

26 There was also the report of Captain Bonneville to the Secretary of War, in 1835, reporting his success in driving twenty loaded wagons through the South Pass over the Rockies and into the Oregon Territory to Green River, in 1832, popularized by Irving's "Bonneville," published in New York and also in England, in 1837, and very widely read in both countries.

All these committee reports were unanimous, all enthusiastic as to the great value of Oregon to us, and the validity of our title at least as far north as 49 degrees, and each was unanimously adopted by the body to which it was made.

As early as 1831 the report of the military committee of the Senate contained the letter of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to the Secretary of War, dated October 29, 1830, stating that in the preceding five years with from eighty to one hundred men, divided into small parties, they had explored the whole region beyond the Rockies from the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Columbia, and had made discoveries and acquired information they deemed it important to communicate to the government. Then, after describing their driving ten wagons loaded with from 1,800 to 2,000 pounds each from St. Louis to the east end of the South Pass and back to St. Louis between April 10 and October 10, 1830, they continue: "This is the first time wagons ever went to the Rocky Mountains, and the ease with which it was done proves the facility of communicating overland with the Pacific, the route beyond the mountains to the Great Falls of the Columbia being easier than on this side."

The Great Falls of the Columbia are not only west of the Blue Mountains, but more than one hundred miles west of where. Whitman six years later established his mission; and this letter of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company was often referred to and quoted in later congressional committee reports and debates, and in books, newspapers and magazine articles before 1843.

These fifteen reports covered about 600 pages, or 350,000 to 375,000 words, but of them all Doctor Mowry, as an "impartial historian," only names three, and only quotes from one—Cushing's, in 1839—to the extent of 297 words, and that only on the wholly unimportant point of whether or not Oregon was included in the Louisiana purchase, while he omits to even allude anywhere in his book to Lieutenant Slacum, or to Poinsett's report, or to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company's wagons in 1830, and their extensive explorations in Oregon before 1830, or to Bonneville proving Oregon easily accessible by wagons in 1832, or to the fact that Whitman, in 1835, wrote (in a letter heretofore carefully suppressed) of Bonneville's wagons, and that the route presented little difficulty for wagons; and though quoting freely from Gray's and Spalding's