"I have been, as it were, waiting for three weeks I shall start to-morrow or next day. Some of the emigrants have been gone a week, and others are just going I hope to be expeditious in traveling. After we get to Ft. Hall I shall try to go on rapidly, if not before." From this Dr. Mowry (erroneously stating that it was written from St. Louis) quotes, on pages 196-7, considerably more than there is space for here, but carefully omits the last two sentences above quoted, which show that a week after the migration had started (except the few stragglers which always bring up the rear of such a great movement). Whitman intended on reaching Fort Hall (beyond which there was no danger from Indians) to leave the migration behind, though that was the only part where there was not a well-known wagon road, and where he could be of any special service to it.
In that of May 30 he wrote:
"You will be surprised to see that we are not yet started. . . . I shall start to-morrow. I regret that I could not have spent some of the time spent here in suspense with my friends in the East. I have only a lad of thirteen, my nephew, with me. I take him to have someone to stay with Mrs. W.
"I cannot give you much of an account of the emigrants until we get on the road. It is said that there are over 200 men, besides women and children."
The proper place for this was on page 197, after that of May 28, but Dr. Mowry neither prints it there, nor puts a footnote of reference to it, but on pages 262-3 he puts it in the Appendix, where few of his readers will peruse it, and fewer note its significance in relation to the claim that Whitman was prominent in originating, organizing and leading the 1843 migration.
(Cf., for the full text of the letters of May 2y and 28, Tr. Or. Pi. Asscn., 1891, pp. 177-9, and for those of May 12 and 30, Vol. 138, MSS. A. B. C. F. M.)
(b) The only detailed contemporaneous account of the migration of 1843 which has ever been printed, being Part 2 of George Wilkes' History of Oregon, published in New York in the spring of 1845.
This account covers 50 pages, or about 40,000 words, and is unquestionably the account which Burnett (Old Pioneer, p. 177) states that he wrote in the winter of 1843-44, "in letters to the New York Herald, covering about 125 pages of foolscap.
Burnett kept a "concise journal" of the whole trip from Missouri to Walla Walla, and so far as known no other journal of that trip was kept, or, if kept, preserved.
The Herald only printed five of these letters in its issues for December 28, 1844, January 5, 6 (two letters) and 18, 1845, breaking off without any explanation or apology, when the
