Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/79

Rh the reason why no evidence has ever been produced from Rev. E. Walker giving the least support to any form of the Whitman Saved Oregon story, as follows: "Mr. Walker died in 1877, before this controversy arose. Hence his testimony was not obtained." Could anything more disingenuous be imagined than this? Eighteen seventy-seven was twelve years after the Saving Oregon story was first printed in full by Spalding, and eleven years after Rev. C. Eells published his entirely different and contradictory version of its origin, and "the controversy" was constantly on after 1865, and "it goes without saying" that the advocates of the story would have been delighted to have secured a statement endorsing either version of it from Walker, or to have used any that he left when he died, in diary or letter. But he was too thoroughly honest a man to make any statement they could use, and his diary and his letters are among the strongest documents, that in the opinion of all real historians who have read them, totally disprove the Saving Oregon theory of Whitman's ride.

As he has repeatedly done in his newspaper articles, our "candid" author in "Reply" (pp. 96-7) assigns as the reason why the Whitman Saved Oregon story was not published earlier that the mission was dependent on the Hudson's Bay Company for supplies and that it would not have been prudent to state the real purpose of Whitman's ride, as it "might have so alienated the company that they would have cut off the supplies."

This, with much more he has written, is designed to convince the public (which is profoundly ignorant of the valid evidence on this subject) that there was antagonism between the Hudson's Bay Company and these missionaries, and the same stuff at greater length was written by Edwin Eells (a brother of Myron) to the Sunday School Times, and published in its issue of November 22, 1902.

In my forthcoming "History of the Acquisition of Oregon and the Long-Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman," I shall print scores of pages of the letters and diaries of these missionaries, which will convince every reader that sorrier fictions were never printed than this stuff about antagonism between the Hudson's Bay Company and these missionaries, and that in reality the Hudson's Bay Company treated all these missionaries with the most constant and Unbounded kindness during the whole existence of the mission.

But there is only space here for two items.

First. No sooner did news of the Whitman massacre reach