Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/60

54 in the case of Rev. M. Eells, he had been made a D. D. by Whitman College), who, knowing of all this vast mass of contemporaneous evidence of undoubted authenticity, should for years suppress all mention of it, and ask people to believe instead of it "the gospel narrative written many years after the event?" This is precisely the case with the Whitman Saved Oregon story. The correspondence of Whitman and his associates with the American Board and with friends and relatives, and the known fragments of their diaries prior to Whitman's starting to return to Oregon in April, 1843, aggregate fully 600,000 words, and in it all is not so much as one short sentence expressing the slightest interest in or concern about the political destiny of any part of the Oregon Territory, or giving the least support in any way to any version of a patriotic origin or purpose of Whitman's ride. Yet Mr. Eells, with all his pretensions of candor and desire to have the truth about Whitman's life made manifest, in the sixty thousand or more words of this "Reply" does not find space to quote so much as one sentence out of all this correspondence and these diaries of Whitman and his associates prior to his return to Oregon. Of letters and diaries of Whitman and his associates of dates subsequent to April, 1843, and down to the first appearance of the first vague version of the Whitman Saved Oregon story in the Sacramento Union of November 16, 1864, there exist fully 450,000 to 500,000 words more, including fully 26,000 to 28,000 words in letters to the Secretary of the American Board from Dr. Whitman himself of dates between November, 1843, and October 18, 1847.

In the contemporaneous Government documents there is, as we have already seen (pp. 23-35 ante) the most indisputable evidence that there was no danger of losing Oregon in the spring of 1843 and that Whitman did not influence the policy of Tyler's Administration.

We have already shown (pp. 20-21 ante) how the expenses of his journey and his frigid reception by the Secretary of the American Board, in Boston, combined with the steadily and rapidly increasing decadence of the Mission subjected Whitman to a great temptation to magnify the importance of his ride, so as to convince the American Board that in some way such good had resulted from it as to justify its expense, and the resulting expense in continuing the Mission, which, but for that ride, must have been destroyed in 1843, or, at latest, 1844; and we have also seen that neither Dr. Whitman nor his wife, in any letters ever written by them, made any claim that he had communicated any information to President Tyler, or Secretary Webster, or that he had bad any interviews with either of them, or had received any promises of assistance from them, or from any other Government official, or that he had found