warm desire to have it properly represented at Washington; and after numerous conversations with the Doctor touching the future prosperity of Oregon, he asked me one day in a very anxious manner, if I thought it would be possible for him to cross the mountains at that time of the year. I told him I thought he could. He next asked: 'Will you accompany me?' After a little reflexion, I told him I would."[1]
Of Whitman's presence in Washington I have been able so far to find not a trace of local contemporary evidence. There is nothing in the Globe or the National Intelligencer among Washington papers, or in Nile's Register, although its pages for 1843 contain many insignificant items of Oregon news, or in the Washington correspondence of the Tribune or the Journal of Commerce. Curtis's Webster and Webster's Private Correspondence are alike silent. Interested as John Quincy Adams was in all diplomatic matters, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, watchful and suspicious of the administration, his voluminous Diary knows nothing of Marcus Whitman. Equally devoid of light are Benton's Thirty Years' View, although Benton was a champion of Oregon, and Greenhow's History of Oregon, although Greenhow was a translator in the State Department and an indefatigable collector of information about Oregon.[2] The Life and Speeches of Senator Linn, of Missouri, who was the most advanced leader of the Oregon party, make no reference to Whitman. Tyler's Tyler lacks any contemporary reference to Whitman's presence in Washington, and if the author had found any he would have given it because he makes some conjectures as to the origin of the notion that Whitman exerted any influence on the diplomacy of that year.[3]
The only contemporary evidence of Whitman's activity in Washington which has ever been advanced is in a letter which he wrote to the Secretary of War after his return to Oregon. The letter ac-
- ↑ Nixon, How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon, p. 306. Lovejoy's letter occupies pp. 305–312. Lovejoy's letter to Gray of Nov. 6, 1869, is similar interior as a whole but does not mention all the facts quoted above. Gray, pp. 324–327.
- ↑ Greenhow's preface is dated February 1844. He devotes twenty-five pages to the Oregon Question in 1843 and half a page to the Emigration of that year, p. 391.
- ↑ Tyler's Letters and Times of the Tylers, II. 439. In the appendix is a letter from Dr. Silas Reed under date of April 8, 1885, which twice makes mention of Whitman's visit to Washington but says nothing further than that he "furnished valuable data about Oregon and the practicability of a wagon route thereto across the mountains," p. 697. Too much stress cannot be laid on this, as Dr. Reed was an old man and his memory might easily have been colored by Barrows's Oregon then recently published. In at least one very important point in this letter he seems to have remembered more than occurred. See p. 699. In the Atlantic Monthly for Oct., 1880, in an art. entitled "Reminiscences of Washington" there is what appears to be an independent recollection of Whitman's visit to Washington, but it bears the familiar marks of Spalding's invention. It was written by Ben. Perley Poore. All that needs to be said is that Poore spent the years 1841–1848 in Europe and the East!
