Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/9



A great amount of unexpected work connected with school affairs making it necessary for me to defer the publication of my "History of the Acquisition of the Old Oregon Territory and the Long-Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman" (which I had intended to publish before May 15, 1904) till the autumn of 1904, so that I may have the summer vacation to carefully re-examine all its numerous quotations and compare them with the originals, and to complete a very full index to it, I have decided to issue a limited edition of these three essays, more especially for the information of some writers whose study of the long struggle for nearly one-twelfth of all our domain on this continent has been so exceedingly superficial, that they are willing to accept such aggregations of blunders as Dr. Mowry's "Marcus Whitman," and Rev. Dr. Eells "Reply to Professor Bourne," and Barrows' "Oregon," and Nixon's "How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon," and Craighead's "Story of Marcus Whitman," as trustworthy historical authorities.

The "Strange Treatment of Original Sources" was published September 3, 1902, in the Daily Oregonian, for many years the leading paper of Oregon, its publication having been arranged for, not by me, but by a prominent citizen of the old Oregon Territory, who desires to have its history correctly written.

Mr. Harvey W. Scott (editor-in-chief of the Oregonian, and first president of the Oregon Historical Society) is a native of the old Oregon Territory, and not only ranks as one of the most brilliant and successful of American newspaper editors, but is beyond all question one of the very best, and probably the best, informed man now living, about the whole history of the old Oregon Territory.

On reading the manuscript of the "Strange Treatment," without solicitation he wrote and put at the head of his editorial page his opinion of it, in the editorial reprinted on page 7 infra.

Several of the topics in the "Strange Treatment" being also treated in the review of Rev. M. Eells' "Reply," it seemed best, when printing these two essays together, to somewhat amplify those topics in the "Strange Treatment" as it was