Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/47

Rh order was even mentioned at the special meeting of the mission, held September 26-27, 1842, though the official record of that meeting (which they all refrain from quoting), shows that it discussed nothing but that order, and Gray's sudden (and, as Eells and Walker both declared) dishonorable desertion of the mission. Dr. Mowry, knowing that this claim that the sole purpose of Whitman's ride was to save Oregon is false, in all his extensive quotations from Gray, Spalding and C. Eells, carefully refrains from even mentioning that they had ever made any such claim.

Furthermore, except Spalding's signature to the resolve of September 28, 1842, Spalding and Gray wrote nothing con^ temporaneously (so far as has ever yet appeared) as to the origin and purpose of Whitman's ride, but when, in 1865-6, they published their version of the Saving Oregon theory of that ride, they agreed in ascribing it to a taunt at a crowded dinner table at Fort Walla Walla a few days before he started on Ooctober 3, 1842, anent the announcement that the Red River emigrants would soon arrive to settle Oregon and secure it for the Hudson's Bay Company, and to the end of their lives (Spalding died in 1874, and Gray in 1889), they both insisted that that was the true account of the origin of Whitman's ride. But it having been proved beyond any possibility of dispute that the whole Walla Walla dinner story is pure fiction, because the Red River settlers came in 1841, as stated, not only in Spalding's diary for September 10, 1841, and in E. Walker's diary for September 21, 1841, but also in Dr. Whitman^s letter of November 11, 1841, in which, out of about 6,000 words in the letter. Whitman devotes the whole of thirty words to the bare announcement of their arrival (in connection with other matters of much more personal concern to himself), and to show how unimportant in his mind was their coming, puts those thirty words in a parenthesis, as follows: "(A large party of settlers as half servants to the company, were at that time" (i. e., October 4, 1841,) "at the fort," (i. e., Walla Walla), "on their way from the Red River to settle on the Cowlitz.)" Dr. Mowry, by not only not even mentioning it, but by substituting for it Rev. C. Eells' entirely different and totally contradictory account, totally repudiates Gray's and Spalding's account of the origin of that ride, which was the only thing about it that was a matter within their own personal experience, and concerning which, therefore, their recollections, if correct, might have had some evidential value, but he quotes extensively and endorses as correct the "recollections" of Spalding and Gray as to what took place between Whitman and Tyler and Webster. That is, totally repudiating as wholly untrue, all that Gray and Spalding constantly declared as long as