Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/17

Rh tomorrow, will grow strong from contemplating the memory of such yesterdays.

This volume has suggested such a picture as 13 will sometime be made as a tribute to genius and the embodiment of highest art by some great painter. The picture will represent the room in which the old heroic missionary, having traveled over mountains and through deserts until his clothing of fur was well-nigh worn from him, and his frame bowed by anxiety and exposure, at that instant when the great Secretary and orator said to him: "There cannot be made a wagon road over the mountains; Sir George Simpson says so," whereat the intrepid pioneer replied: "There is a wagon road, for I have made it."

What could be a more fitting memorial for such a man as this than a Christian college called Whitman College? He was more to the ulterior Northwest than John Harvard has ever been to the Northeast of our common country. Nothing but such an institution may represent all the ideas and inspirations which were the wealth of such a man's brain and heart and his gift to the Republic. He was an avant courier of the truths on which alone republics and democracies may endure.

Whitman not only conducted the expedition of men and wagons to Oregon, after President Tyler had made his promise that the bargain, which Daniel Webster proposed, should not be made, but he led an expedition of ideas and sentiments which have made the names Oregon, Washington and Idaho synonymous with human progress, good government and civilization. When the soldier-statesman of the Civil War