Page:Some Observations Upon the Negative Testimony and the General Spirit and Methods of Bourne and Marshall in Dealing with the Whitman Question.pdf/4

102 hands off at their farm at Waiilatpu in order to raise money to found Whitman College, how he travelled up and down on horseback through Eastern Washington, sleeping under a tree at night and living on dried salmon, parched corn and spring water, superintending schools, founding churches, ministering to the needy, with never a thought for personal gain or comfort, making such a place in the hearts of people of all sorts that throughout this state he is considered a veritable St. Paul,—then for a soured and spiteful old man who never saw him, or had any conception of the motives of his life, to so distort the letters about the Dalles town-site as to hold him up to history as a grafter and looter who fabricated the "Whitman legend" as a basis for plundering the national treasury! The reviewers who commend Marshall's book must have a curious conception of justice and "finality." The very use made by Bourne and Marshall of the words "Myth" and "legend" is a commentary on their spirit. It is the spirit of the advocate, of the prejudiced pleader, not of the fair and impartial historian. In the regular use that they make of those words they beg the whole question. The very point at issue is, Is this a myth? They assume that it is, name it "myth," hammer the idea in like a persistent advertiser, and at the end triumphantly exclaim, "We have proved our case!" What kind of a spirit does that show in a historian? On pages 7 and 8 of Eells' Reply are quotations from letters by John Fiske to Marshall in which he counsels him "to be less vehement," and says "there is great value in a quiet form of statement." Marshall, on pages 50 and 51 of his "History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon Story," goes into a clumsy explanation of this in order, I should judge, to make an extra slap at Eells, and to convey to his readers the impression that he and John Fiske were great friends. It is worth noticing that Fiske in a private letter to a man in this state, said in substance: "I think that Marshall makes a strong case, but what is there for him to be so angry about?" What indeed? In view of his habitual anger, villification, and general bad temper, inexcusable in a historian, may we not go beyond Professor Fiske and conclude that he makes a strong case—against himself? We ask readers to turn to Marshall's own pages to find proof of his habits of villification. Among numerous examples note his attempts in chapter 7 of volume 2 to belittle Whitman, to misinterpret and distort his letters, to minimize the greatness of his efforts, to under-rate the privations of that first missionary journey across the continent in 1836, and the fortitude of those two women, Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Spalding, the first white women to cross the mountains. None but a man of microscopic soul could quote, as Marshall does in pages 190,