Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/242

 Dr. Marcus Whitman commenced medical practice in New York state, but after a few months went to Canada. No record has yet been found of the location of his practice from May, 1826,to September, 1827. From September to December, 1827, he took over the practice of a friend who was ill, at Sugar Grove, Warren County, Pennsylvania.

Early in 1828 he settled for practice on the Niagara peninsula, twenty-five miles west of Niagara Falls, in the township of Gainsboro, where a little hamlet surrounded a sawmill, and was known as Snyder's Mills. It is now called Saint Anns. Here he practiced for a time on his New York state license, but in 1829 the medical board of Upper Canada granted him a license without examination.

There was no other physician within twenty miles. In this frontier town there was little of intellectual companionship for Dr. Whitman, except one man, the local clergyman, the Reverend Daniel Ward Eastman. He was a man of superior talents and personality, although he had entered the ministry in 1800 without going to college. He had been privately trained under a clergyman, since there were no theological schools in 1800. Mr. Eastman appears to have been the only man there who was the peer of Dr. Whitman. Dr. Whitman became a member of his church.

In the autumn of 1830 Dr. Whitman returned to Rushville, New York, the town of his birth and his mother's residence, and began study of Latin and other subjects under the local minister, the Reverend Joseph Brackett, a graduate of Williams College and former tutor there, a man of high talent. It seems probable that from contact with Mr. Eastman and knowledge that his pathway to the ministry was marked by little formal education, there was at this time a recrudescence of the desire of Dr. Whitman to enter the ministry, and that he planned to follow this method of private study under a clergyman.

Within eight months this clergyman developed an illness that resulted in his death in 1832. Thus Dr. Whitman had to face another of those serious decisions of which so many marked his life. His decision was to continue in the medical profession. He was a legal practitioner in New York state and had had four