Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/75

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That Tyler had an utterly impracticable scheme in his mind of a tripartite treaty between the United States, Great Britain and Mexico is true, and has been well known since 1885, through Vol. 2, of "Letters and Times of the Tylers," by President L. G. Tyler of William and Mary College, Virginia (who was bom in 1852), and who, like Fiske, McMaster, Scudder and others, was imposed upon by Barrows, and so gave the Whitman Saved Oregon story some endorsement, though, as he wrote to me in 1899, he had never seen any con- temporaneous mention of Whitman, either in his father's papers or those of his half brother, John Tyler, Jr., private secretary to President John Tyler. On reading my Mss. he was straightaway convinced that not only he, but his half brother John, had been imposed upon by Barrows, and that it was Dr. White, and not Dr. Whitman, whom Mr. Reed saw in Washington, and whom John Tyler, Jr., thought he remem- bered, more than forty years afterwards, having seen at the White House. Mr. M. Eells (Reply," p. 94) admits that "Dr. Whitman without doubt never heard of the tripartite plan," but though this inchoate project was, as far as any evidence shows, the only one that any President ever even "dreamed of," as a plan, not for yielding up any part of Oregon south of 49 degrees, but for selling for a good round price that part north and west of the Columbia, Mr. Eells insists that in some mysterious way Whitman prevented that plan, of which he never heard. That President L. G. Tyler has for some time been fully satisfied that the Oregon policy of President John Tyler was not controlled by Whitman, and that President Tyler-s three letters of December 11 and 18, 1845, and January 1, 1846, show beyond dispute that neither Whitman nor anybody else, either in the Spring of 1843, nor for more than two and one-half years thereafter, had modified in the least degree the ideas about the best policy to pursue regarding Oregon, which we know, from his other correspondence, that he held in 1842, has been already shown. (Cf. pp. 35-37 ante.) It scarcely needs be said that M. Eells, like all the other advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, has never even alluded to the above mentioned three letters of President Tyler.

Our candid author assails the honesty and the accuracy of the late Hon. Elwood Evans, a Pacific Coast historical writer of some note, as follows. "Reply" (p. 22) "Elwood Evans, too, properly falls under this criticism." In 1883 Dr. C. Eells had stated in regard to the meeting of the Mission held in Sep-