Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/63

Rh day agreed upon as C. Eells declared 35 and 41 years afterwards in his various "statements" (wholly unsupported by any contemporaneous letters or other written documents), it was a date not earlier than October 17th that was agreed upon. This letter of Oct. 3-8, 1842 (written by Walker and endorsed by Eells), and of which a duplicate was received by the Secretary of the American Board on May 3, 1843, not only contained "a long and strong plea for the continuance of the mission," but a positive statement that to carry out the order of the Board issued in February, 1842, ordering the discontinuance of the Southern branch of the Mission (i. e., three of its four stations) and recalling Spalding and Gray to the States meant the destruction of the Mission, and also a positive statement that Whitman's going to the States, instead of being discussed for part of two days (as Rev. C. Eells asserted in his 1883 affidavit), on a political mission was not even proposed by him till just as the others were about to start home (on the morning of September 28th), which was after the record of the Special Meeting had been made up and signed. This is fully confirmed by Walker's Journal, which states under date of September 28, 1842, that it was at breakfast on that morning that Dr. Whitman "let out his plan" to go to the States. But there is not the least intimation either in the official report of the meeting, or in Walker's letter endorsed by C. Eells, or in Walker's Journal, or in any subsequent letter or diary of Walker, or C. Eells, or H. H. Spalding, or W. H. Gray prior to Spalding's articles in the Pacific in October and November, 1865, and in the cases of Gray and C. Eells prior to 1866, that anything but the business of the Mission was discussed at that Special Meeting of September 26-27, 1842, while from Walker's pen not a sentence has ever been produced which fumis'hes the least support to any version of the story that the political destinies of Oregon were even mentioned at that Special Meeting, or that Whitman's ride had any political purpose or accomplished any political result. Having hastily discussed his going on the morning of the 28th, without again convening the Special Meeting, they passed two "Resolves," but did not put them into the record of the Special Meeting either as an Appendix, or otherwise, so that as far as appears by its report, signed by E. Walker, Moderator, and Gushing Eells, Scribe, Whitman's going to the States for any purpose was not even mentioned in the Special Meeting. One of these two "Resolutions" of September 28, 1842, approved of W. H. Gray's withdrawing from the Mission (though the last sentence but one in the official report of the Special Meeting states that they had refused to pass a similar resolution that Gray had offered on the 26th.)

The second of these resolutions (quoted verbatim on p. 13 ante) was