more confiding public so taken in. The result has been that more people in this country know the fictitious history of the Oregon question invented by the Rev. H. H. Spalding than know the real facts, and that for many others who have not accepted the whole of the Whitman legend the real history of Oregon has been distorted out of all proportion. These are strong words, but the propagation of the legend of Marcus Whitman after the publication of Barrows' Oregon 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.[1]
The first indication of the new life breathed into the legend by Barrows' Oregon was its insertion in a school history by Mr. H. E. Scudder.[2] The significance of this was keenly appreciated by Cushing Eells: "When Dr. Eells was presented with a copy of the latter work (Scudder's History of the United States, for Schools and Academies) which contains also [i. e., beside the narrative] a picture of Dr. Whitman leaving his station for Washington, it was most plain that the truth learned by the school children had been fostered by God and would be scattered so far and wide and deep that no combination of learned men or human reasoning could successfully oppose it."[3]
About the same time Charles Carleton Coffin, a most successful historical story teller for boys and girls, prepared from Spalding and Gray a vivid narrative of the incident for his Building the Nation, in which will be found all the legendary details of the original fiction.[4] The influence of Barrows was
- ↑ "This is the statement made of "Whitman's object and arguments by the prudential committee to whom they were addressed: but Gray wickedly asserts that Whitman went to Washington with a political purpose, instead of going on the business of the mission." I, 343. Bancroft's Oregon was written before the Whitman controversy of 1882-84 but was not published until after it. This accounts for the slight attention paid to the Spalding-Gray story.
- ↑ History of the United States, for Schools and Academies, Philadelphia, 1884, 348-49; cf. also, Scudder's New History of the United States, 1897, 310-11.
- ↑ Biography of Cushing Eells, 116.
- ↑ N.Y., 1883, pp. 371-86.
