Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/37

Rh printed the same matter substantially in Congressional Debates and Committee Reports many times during the preceding 18 years.

How does Dr. Mowry treat this matter? On pp. 190-191 he has appropriated (without permission from and without credit to the author), a page from a copyrighted manuscript sent him in 1899, by the writer of this criticism, which page does not quote one word from Wilkes' Report, but merely states my inferences (written on first reading the manuscript of this Special Report in 1887, at the Navy Department), as to why the Administration would not allow the whole report to be printed in 1843; but though the immediate context of this page of my inferences in the manuscript sent him contained copious quotations from this Special Report of Wilkes, and from his other unpublished dispatches, giving full information about Oregon and the operations and aims of the Hudson^s Bay Company, Dr. Mowry not only nowhere copies one word of that context, but he nowhere quotes one word from any of Wilkes' Reports, nor prints one word which will give his readers any information as to the cause of, the time of, or the extent and values of Wilkes' explorations of Oregon, or of the time when he filed this Special Report, or of the fact that for nine months before Whitman could by any possibility have reached Washington, Tyler's Administration could, on any day, have had interviews with Wilkes and the other officers of his expedition, who knew a vast deal more about all of Oregon that was really in dispute than all the missionaries—Methodist and American Board put together,—did then, or for many years after.

The facts about Wilkes' exploration and Special Report are so completely destructive of that essential postulate of the Whitman Legend that the Government at Washington was indifferent as to the fate of Oregon, and ignorant as to its value, that not a single advocate of that Legend has ever given his readers any information of the slightest consequence about Wilkes, and most of them (including the two latest advocates of the Legend, Johnson's "Century of Expansion," and Carpenter's "the American Advance,") do not even mention his name!

Gray and Mrs. Dye, carefully refraining from stating anything of any real value about Wilkes' work, wantonly slander him as follows: "To the disgrace of the leader of that squadron, the general impression of all the early settlers of this country is, to the present day, that he understood and tasted the qualities of Dr. McLoughlin's liquors, and received the polite attentions of the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Company with far more pleasure than he looked into or regarded