Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/48

42 they lived was the true account of all about Whitman's ride that came within their own personal observation and experience, to wit., its origin, our autjor imposes on the credulity of his readers what these same men "recollected," from twenty-three to forty years after the event, about what they thought Whitman told them took place more than 3,000 miles away from them, and concerning which, as they have never been able to produce so much as one short sentence in any contemporary book, magazine, newspaper, government document, diary or letter, that supports their "recollections," it is certain that they knew nothing except from hearsay, or a lively imagination. But that is not the end of Dr. Mowry's offense in these quotations from Gray and Spalding, for both of them "recollected" as clearly as they did anything else of what they claimed took place in Washington, that Whitman succeeded in preventing the trading off of Oregon in the Ashburton treaty, "for a codfishery on Newfoundland.^' (Cf., Lecture by Rev. H. H. Spalding, quoted in Sen. Ex. Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3d session; also W. H. Gray's Hist, of Or., pp. 290, 316.) That, however, having been proved by the date of the signing of the Ashburton treaty to have been as destitute of truth as their account of the origin of Whitman's ride, Dr. Mowry from his quotations from Gray and Spalding carefully omits what they "recollected" about the Ashburton treaty, though as late as 1870 and 1871 they both "recollected" the Ashburton treaty as certainly as anything else either "recollected"—or imagined — about Whitman's ride.

Perrin B. Whitman, the nephew, thirteen years old, whom Dr. Whitman took back with him in 1843, on February 10, 1882, wrote a letter from Lapwai Indian Agency, Idaho, to Rev. M. Eells (which is to be found on pages 12 and 13 of Mr. Eells' pamphlet, "Marcus Whitman, M. D. Proofs of His Work in Saving Oregon to the United States and in Promoting the Immigration of 1843." Portland, Ore., 1883).

In it Perrin Whitman wrote, "I heard him" (i. e., Dr. Whitman) "say repeatedly on the journey, and after we reached his mission, Wailatpu, that he went to the States in the winter of 1842 and 1843 for the sole purpose of bringing an immigration with wagons across the plains to Oregon."

This Dr. Mowry quotes (on p. 137), but omits the word "sole." It would be interesting, if space permitted, to examine the multitude of geographical and historical errors in this book not herein touched upon.

Suffice it to say that some of them are extremely laughable and others saddening as illustrations of the old adage, "How desperate are the shifts of a confirmed theorist," but as Dr. Mowry has written all the rest of the book on the same lines as the parts herein criticized, after this examination of his