Page:Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, re Whitman Massacre, 1871.pdf/22

Rh name of the Lord Jesus or my country. I am a missionary, it is true, but my country needs me now." And taking leave of his missionary associates, his comfortable home, and his weeping companion, with but little hope of seeing them again in this world, he entered upon his fearful journey the 2d of October, 1842, and reached the city of Washington the 2d of March. 1843, with his face, nose, ears, hands, feet, and legs badly frozen. It is well that the good man did not live to see himself and his faithful associates robbed and their character slandered by that very Government he was ready to lay down his life for. It would have been to him, as it is to me, the most mournful event of my life.

Nothing but the continued outstretched hand of God, and his clothing of buffalo hides, with the fur inside, and his unyielding spirit, saved him from perishing from the intense cold.

On that terrible 13th of January, 1843, when so many in all parts of our country froze to death, the doctor, against the advice of his Mexican guide, left his camp in a deep gorge of the mountains of New Mexico, in the morning, to pursue his journey. But on reaching the divide, the cold became so intense, and the animals actually becoming maddened by the driving snows, the doctor saw his peril, and attempted to retrace his steps, and, if possible, to find his camp, as the only hope of saving their lives. But the drifting snow had totally obliterated every trace, and the air becoming almost as dark as night by the maddening storm, the doctor saw that it would be impossible for any human being to find camp, and commending himslefhimself [sic] and distant wife to his covenant-keeping God, he gave himself, his faithful guide, and animals up to their snowy grave, which was fast closing about them, when the guide, ob serving the ears of one of the mules intently bent forward, sprang upon him, giving him the reins, exclaiming: "This mule will find the camp if he can live to reach it." The doctor mounted another and followed. The faithful animal kept down the divide a short distance, and then turned square down the steep mountain. Through deep snow-drifts, over frightful precipices, down, down, he pushed, unguided and unurged, as if he knew the lives of the two men and the fate of the great expedition depended upon his endurance and his faithfulness, and into the thick timber, and stopped suddenly over a bare spot, and as the doctor dismounted—the Mexican was too far gone—behold the very fire-place of their morning camp! Two brands of fire were yet alive and smoking; plenty of timber in reach. The buffalo hides had done much to protect the doctor, and providentially he could move about and collect dry limbs, and soon had a rousing fire. The guide revived, but both were badly frozen. They remained in this secluded hole in the mountains several days, till the cold and the storm abated.

At another time, with another guide, on the head-waters of the Arkansas, after traveling all day in a terrible storm, they reached a small river for camp, but without a stick of wood anywhere to be had except on the other side of the stream, which was covered with ice, but too thin to support a man erect. The storm cleared away, and the night bid fair to be intensely cold; besides, they must have fire to prepare bread and food. The doctor took his ax in one hand and a willow stick in the other, laid himself upon the thin ice, and spreading his legs and arms, he worked himself over on his breast, cut his wood and slid it over, and returned in the same way.

That was the last time the doctor enjoyed the luxury of his ax—so indispensable at that season of the year, in such a country. That night a wolf poked his nose under the foot of the bed where the ax had been placed for safe-keeping, and took it off for a leather string that had been wrapped around the split helve.

On reaching the settlements, Dr. Whitman found that many of the now old Oregonians—Waldo, Applegate, Hamtree, Keyser and others—who had once made calculations to come to Oregon, had abandoned the idea because of the representations from Washington that every attempt to take wagons and ox teams through the Rocky and Blue Mountains to the Columbia had failed. Dr. Whitman saw at once what the stop ping of wagons at Fort Hall every year meant. The representations purported to come from Secretary Webster but really from Governor Simpson, who, magnifying the statements of his chief trader, Grant, at Fort Hall, declared the Americans must be going mad, from their repeated fruitless attempts to take wagons and teams through the impassable regions of the Columbia, and that the women and children of those wild fanatics had been saved from a terrible death only by the repeated and philanthropic labors of Mr. Grant, at Fort Hall, in furnishing them with horses. The doctor told these men as he met them that his only object in crossing the mountains in the dead of winter, at the risk of his life, and through untold sufferings, was to take back an American emigration that summer through the mountains to the Columbia with their wagons and their teams. The route was practicable. We had taken our cattle and our families through seven years before. They had nothing to fear; but to be ready on his return. The stopping of wagons at Fort Hall was a Hudson Bay Company scheme to prevent the settling of the country by Americans, till they could settle it