Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/409

Rh the order of the sections in printing. It printed first—the installment of December 28, 1844—what was probably the closing portion of the manuscript. The sections are given below in what appears to be their natural order—the order in which they were composed. This Burnett material was sent to New York naturally under one enclosure.

If Burnett wrote at this time "some hundred and twentyfive pages of foolscap," as he says he did, not more than half of his manuscript was printed by the Herald. For that number of pages of foolscap published would have filled at least fifteen columns of the Herald, whereas the matter printed constituted hardly seven and one fourth columns; and I shall point out later that it is almost certain that this Burnett manuscript, as a whole, was used for the Wilkes' account of the migration of 1843, and Wilkes covers the whole trip, and not merely a portion of it, as do the Herald letters.

In his "Recollections," page 101, Burnett says: "I kept a concise journal of the trip as far as Walla Walla, and have it now before me." This journal no doubt furnished the basis of his narrative in the first four letters and of the twenty-seven pages in his "Recollections" in which he describes the trip. In fact, the resemblance between this part of the "Recollections" and these letters is so striking and of such a character as to suggest that this part of the "Recollections" was written up from a first draft of the letters, which he would naturally have retained and preserved when sending the letters to the Herald. The historical significance of this probability is that it intakes this portion of the "Recollections" virtually a contemporary source for the whole of the migration of 1843.

The last date on the journey given by the letters is June 27th. Yet it seems almost certain that the copy sent by Burnett to the Herald covered the whole trip. One reason