Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/74

68 Dr. Henry M. Field the admission that his only authority for it was a newspaper slip, sent him by Mr. Geo. L. Chase, an insurance man of Hartford, Conn., and being assured by Mr. Chase that he clipped it from a newspaper when traveling on the Pacific Coast, and sent it to Dr. Field, not expecting him to publish it, but merely for his opinion as to its correctness, I abandoned all further attempt to find who fabricated it. I subsequently found it used by H. H. Bancroft, in "Chronicles of the Builders," Vol. 1, pp. 518-19, but as that was not copyrighted till 1890, and as Mr. M. Eells gives as his authority a manuscript written by a Mrs. C. S. Fringle, in December, 1884; and as presumably she did not fabricate it, but like Mr. Chase, clipped it from some newspaper, there is no likelihood that its author will ever be known. Not only is its internal evidence sufficient to convince any one with common literary training that Webster never uttered it, but that conviction is rendered a certainty by the fact that Webster was not in the Senate from j[ 841 to 1845, ^^d that no such bill was ever introduced Tn the Senate till March, 1846, and a careful examination of the Cong. Globe shows that upon that bill Webster did not speak at all; and by his great Faneuil Hall (Boston) speech on Oregon in November, 1845, he had irrevocably committed himself individually, and the Whig party for which he spoke, to the line of 49 degrees to the Pacific. On p. 95 he quotes that other fabrication, which has now been doing duty for 33 years, in support of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, as follows: "In confirmation of this E. D. P., in 1870, wrote that an eminent legal gentleman of Massachusetts, and a personal friend of Mr. Webster, with whom he had several times conversed on the subject, remarked to E. D. P., 'It is safe to assert that our country owes it to Dr. Whitman and his associate missionaries, that all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains and south as far as the Columbia River is not now owned by England, and held by the Hudson's Bay Company.'"

This has heretofore been credited, as it was by Mr. Spalding, who first used it (Cf. p. 23, Sen. Ex. Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3d Sess.) to the "N. Y. Independent, January, 1870." Not January 27, as M. Eells says in his footnote, in which also he admits that he does not know in what it appeared, but that "It was found as a scrap of a newspaper, among Mr. Spalding's papers, and is signed E. D. P. or E. D. B. or E. D. R., for the last letter is slightly torn." I have spent considerable time and a little money in searching and having searched the files of newspapers to determine, if possible, where this first appeared, but without success, though well aware that if it had appeared in all the newspapers on earth, its doubly anonymous character makes it of not the least evidential value.