Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/187

 her head entirely, and leaped to her feet, shouting "Why, there is Marcus!" The equilibrium of the meeting was for the time almost destroyed.

Within a few months, Dr. Whitman was married to Narcissa Prentiss. He persuaded Rev. H. H. Spalding and wife, who had hitherto planned to go as missionaries to the Osage Indians, to join them for Oregon. W. H. Gray was secured to go with the party as secular manager.

And now began the famous "Wedding Journey" from New York to the banks of the Columbia. It included within itself the romance, the pathos, the devotion, the heroism, and at the last, the tragedy of missions.

The History of Oregon, by W. H. Gray, is the chief original authority for this journey, though the women of the party kept journals which are of great value. It would seem that all the members of the party were of marked personality. Dr. Whitman was a tall, spare man, with deep blue eyes, wide mouth, iron-grey hair, of inflexible resolution, and very set when his mind was once made up, though flexible and even variable till that point had been reached. He was of enormous physical strength and endurance, with a constitution, as one who knew him later told the writer, "like a saw-mill."

Mrs. Whitman was a woman of liberal education for those times, large, fair-haired, blue-eyed, dignified, and somewhat reserved (rather "starchy," the mountain men thought her), very ladylike, refined, and attractive. One of the pathetic and interesting things about her is related by Mrs. Martha J. Lamb in the Magazine of American History, in 1884. This re-