Now Benton said, "Thirty thousand rifles in the valley of the Columbia is our surest ground of title."
"What are you here for, leaving your post?" gruffly inquired the Secretary of the American Board, eying his shaggy visitor as Dr. Whitman entered the office in Boston.
"I came on business to Washington," answered the doctor, unabashed.
"Opening up new territories to settlement is not a part of our business," was the Secretary's comment on his scheme to pilot emigrants over the mountains. "Here, take some money and get some decent clothes; then we'll talk."
"Marcus came to father's house in sorry plight," says his sister Harriet in a letter to this author. "He had been so chilled in coming over the mountains that he was suffering all the time. He was the grandest man in overcoming difficulties and executing the most improbable things. Yet his heart was tender as a woman's."
By order of Congress Senator Benton's son-in-law, John Charles Fremont, was despatched to accompany the proposed immigration. When the first grass sprung the emigrants crossed the border with their rifles on their shoulders. Already the long train of wagons was far out on the Platte when Dr. Whitman joined them in May, so far out that Fremont barely caught up and followed in their wake to Oregon.
Long after Webster remarked to a friend, "It is safe to assert that our country owes it to Dr. Whitman and his associate missionaries that all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Columbia is not now owned by England and held by the Hudson's Bay Company."
