Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/53

Rh "secretly," and "was a stab in the dark," and that I "was afraid to meet my opponents" (i. e., the advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story) "in argument," and that I knew that my side "had been worsted in the disaission on the Pacific coast." Nothing farther from the truth than these statements are can be imagined. I well knew that notwithstanding the careful suppression of all the conclusive contemporaneous correspondence and diaries of Whitman and his associates, which were in possession of the advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, and notwithstanding its opponents were heavily handicapped by their inability to obtain access, in the States of Oregon and Washington, to many of the most important government documents bearing on the case, the weight of argument was so vastly against the Saving Oregon theory of Whitman's ride that no candid and fairly well-informed historian who will sit down and read that discussion as it appeared from 1879 to 1885, in the columns of the Portland Oregonian, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Tacoma Ledger, and in pamphlets which were mainly reprints of the nswspapernewspaper [sic] articles, will, when he has finished them, have any confidence in any version of the Saving Oregon theory of that winter's ride. But I also well knew that scarcely an echo of that discussion was heard east of the Rocky Mountains, except among the very devoted adherents of the American Board of Foreign Missions, and the Presbyterian Missionary Board, very few of whom read any of the arguments and evidence against the Saving Oregon theory, but only the specious and sophistical defence of it by Rev. Thomas Laurie, D. D., (the official historian of the American Board), in the Missionary Herald, for February and September, 1885.

As to the charge that I was afraid to meet the advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story in argument, it only needs to be said that nearly six years ago I proposed to Dr. W. A. Mowry, that if he would induce the American Board to print every letter in its archives from Mr. and Mrs. Whitman, together with such other letters as I should name from the correspondence of the other members of the Oregon Mission, viz.: Rev. C. Eells, Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. Elkanah Walker, Rev. A. B. Smith, Mr. W. H. Gray and Mr. Cornelius Rogers, together with such letters as I should select from the published correspondence of the above parties, and such as I should select from the correspondence of Rev. G. H. Atkinson with the American Board, so that the world might have a chance