Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/94



Says Mrs. Whitman: "They were just eating breakfast when we arrived, and soon we were seated at the table and treated to fresh salmon, potatoes, tea, bread and butter. What a variety, thought I. You cannot imagine what an appetite these rides in the mountains give a person."

We have preferred to let Mrs. Whitman tell in her own way the story of this memorable wedding 82 journey. The reader will look in vain for any mourning or disquietude. Two noble women started in to be the helpmeets of two good men, and what a grand success they made of it. There is nowhere any spirit of grumbling, but on the contrary, a joyousness and exhilaration. True womanhood of all time is honored in the lives of such women. It was but the coming of the first white women who ever crossed the Rocky Mountains and notable as an heroic wedding journey, but to the world it was not only exalted heroism, but a great historic event, the building of an empire whose wide-reaching good cannot easily be overestimated.

It was an event unparalleled in real or romantic literature, and so pure and exalted in its motives, and prosecuted so unostentatiously, as to honor true womanhood for all time to come.83