Under the title "Did Dr. Whitman Save Oregon?" Mrs. Victor published the first denial of the Whitman legend in The Californian in September 1880, presenting evidence she had gathered for Bancroft's History of Oregon.[1] The article was written to refute Samuel A. Clarke's "How Dr. Whitman Saved Oregon" which had appeared in the July 188o issue of The Californian. An even more scholarly article by Mrs. Victor in which she still more completely demolished the Spalding-Gray story was published in the Portland Oregonian, November 6, 1884. It was appropriately sub-titled "An Exhaustive Examination . . . of All the Points of the So Called Whitman Controversy." It is not only exhaustive but also exhausting, covering almost an entire page in very fine print, with almost two columns of footnotes in even finer print. This article touched off a renewal of the controversy with Elwood Evans supporting Mrs. Victor and Myron Eells, W. H. Gray, and E. C. Ross opposing them. The argument was again revived after the publication in 1886 of the first volume of Bancroft's History of Oregon. This time Judge Deady came to the aid of Evans and Victor.
While it is impossible to go into all the phases of the Whitman controversy, the writings of Professor Bourne are of particular interest. He became concerned about the Whitman legend because of its general acceptance, at least in part, by professional historians, including Scudder, Burgess, McMaster, and Von Holst. Bourne attributed this acceptance to the influence of William Barrows' Oregon: the Struggle for Possession, published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1883 in the American Commonwealth series. In his Essays in Historical Criticism Bourne stated, "The propagation of the legend of Marcus Whitman is simply amazing, in view of the almost concurrent publication of Bancroft's Oregon, in which the true history of Marcus Whitman is told and the legend dismissed with a contemptuous footnote."[2]
Mrs. Victor first learned of Professor Bourne's interest
[333]
