February 15, and Boston March 30, and was back again in St. Louis May 12, to write a pamphlet which could be circulated in Texas, where Zachrey lived, early enough for his father to start from Independence, May 22, for Oregon.[1] We have seen how Spalding interpolated Dr. White's letter, and Zachrey's letter contains things that Whitman could not honestly have put in a pamphlet.[2]
As the years passed Dr. Whitman attached so much importance to his services to the emigration that he evidently came to regard such a service as the purpose of his journey to the East. If it had been among his purposes it was to such a degree incidental and minor that he apparently never mentioned it to the Committee of the American Board, nor did his fellow missionary, Mr. Walker, refer to it.
In 1847, in defending his return East in 1842, Whitman declared that the American interest in Oregon hinged on the success of the immigration of 1843. Had that been disastrous it may be easily seen what would have become of American interests. The disaster last year to those "who left the track I made for them in 1843 … demonstrates what I did in making my way to the States in the winter of 1842–3, after the third of October. It was to open a practical route and safe passage and secure a favorable report of the journey from emigrants, which in connection with other objects caused me to leave my family and brave the toils and dangers of the journey." He reiterates this same idea October 18.[3]
It may be questioned if the emigration of 1843 would have met with disaster if Whitman had not been with them, or, if it had,
- ↑ Burnett, Recollections, p. 99.
- ↑ For example "that he himself (that is Whitman) and mission party had taken their families, cattle and wagons through to the Columbia six years before." Exec. Doc. 37, p. 26. This was not true. Whitman changed his wagon into a two-wheeled cart at Fort Hall and left the two-wheeled cart at Fort Boise. Bancroft, I. 133. Farnham saw it there in 1839. Travels, p. 77. In Exec. Doc. 37, pp. 74–78, is a series of resolutions adopted by the officials of a Baptist Church in Brownsville, Oregon, Oct. 22, 1869, which were evidently drafted by Spalding. In resolution 6, in a report of Whitman's interview with President Tyler, is this sentence: "By his personal representations to President Tyler of this country, of its vast importance, and his assurance of a wagon route, as he assured him we had taken cattle, a wagon, and his missionary families through six years before." Now the "we" may be an inadvertent survival of Spalding's language or a misprint for "he." The interesting thing is that the Zachrey letter supplies the materials for this report of Whitman's conversation with Tyler. As the statement was not true in either case, the most natural conclusion is that Spalding invented it and inserted it in the text of the Zachrey letter. The rest of the Zachrey letter probably represents the coalescence after twenty-three years in Zachrey's memory of what Whitman did on the way for the emigrants with the indistinct recollection of the inducements to start. It is probable that reports of some of Dr. White's speeches to promote emigration in 1842 (Cf. White's Ten Years in Oregon, pp. 142–143) reached the elder Zachrey, and the boy (he was seventeen years old) later attributed the efforts of White to Whitman.
- ↑ These letters were printed in the Oregon Native Son, Feb 1900, pp. 471–472.
