Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/41

Rh Webster was ready to accept the Columbia or some other line south of 49 degrees as the north boundary of Oregon, which is th-e very cornerstone of the Whitman Saved Oregon story?

He neither quotes a word from this debate, nor gives any intimation of its importance, and only says (p. 189): "During the winter of 1842-3 a great debate on the Oregon question took place in the Senate, which lasted a number of weeks, and brought out a great diversity of views concerning the Oregon question."

Unable to find a sentence of any contemporaneous government document or letter, or even newspaper statement, that Whitman ever had any interview with President Tyler or Secretary Webster, or that he in the least degree influenced the Oregon policy of Tyler's administration, after quoting freely from the unsupported "recollections" of Gray, Spalding, C. Eells, Dr. Geiger and others between 1865 and 1882 as to what they thought Whitman had told them in 1843 to 1847, Dr. Mowry prints on pages 172-3 a letter dated June 6, 1898, from Dr. L. G. Tyler, President of William and Mary College, Virginia, and some extracts from his "Letters and Times of the Tylers," which he declares establish his claims about Whitman having interviewed Tyler and influenced his Oregon policy.

Not only are the letter and the quotations entirely inconclusive, but less than a year after the date of that letter he quotes, the writer of this review furnished to President L. G. Tyler extensive typewritten copies of the correspondence of Whitman and his associates with the American Board, which Dr. Mowry and the other advocates of the Whitman Legend have so carefully suppressed, and also full information about Dr. White and his work for Oregon (of which he wrote me that he had never heard before), with the result that he was speedily convinced that both he and his half-brother, John Tyler, Jr., private secretary to President John Tyler, had been imposed upon by Barrows* "Oregon" Twich was published (in 1883) and read by them just before he had his first conversation about Whitman with John Tyler, Jr.), and had confounded Dr. White with Dr. Whitman; and that Dr. Whitman had no influence on the Oregon policy of President Tyler.

(Cf. the review of "The Marcus Whitman Legend," by Professor Hodder, in the Dial for January 16, 1902, in which (p. 42) Professor Hodder writes, "That Dr. Tyler does not regard it" (i. e., what Dr. Mowry has quoted from him) "as sustaining the claim that Whitman influenced the administration, appears from a recent letter to the writer of this review, in which he says, 'I do not believe that Dr. Whitman controlled the policy of President Tyler's administration in any way.'"

Had Dr. Mowry cared to quote original and strictly con-