Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/231

 he erected by his patient toil, had grown to be worth a million, it would not have added a single dollar to Whitman's wealth. Even the physician's fees given him by grateful sufferers, under the rules of the Board, were reported and counted as a part of his meager salary.

The idea that a man should leave wife and home, and endure the perils of a mid-winter journey to the States, to persuade Congress "To buy sheep" and "make his Mission a stopping place," or the American Board to allow him to work sixteen hours a day for the Cayuse Indians, is a heavy task on credulity, and is so far-fetched as to make Whitman's maligners only ridiculous.

But it is Hubert Howe Bancroft, the author of the thirty-eight volume History of the Pacific States, who is the offender-in-chief. As a collector and historian, Bancroft necessarily required many co-workers. It was in his failure to get them into harmony and tell the straight connected truth, in which he made his stupendous blunders. Chapter is arrayed against chapter, and volume against volume. One tells history, and another denies it. In Volume I, page 379, he refers to the incident, already fully recited in another chapter, of the visit of the Flathead Indians to St. Louis, and does not once doubt its historic accuracy; but in Volume 210 XXIII, another of his literary army works up the same historic incident, and says: