"THE STORY OF MARCUS WHITMAN" REFUTED.
By H. M. BEADLE.
Our Presbyterian friends are determined that the world shall know what a hero their church possessed in Dr. Marcus Whitman, their missionary to the Cayuse Indians, at Wailatpu, Oregon, now in the state of Washington. They do not honor Whitman because of his exceptional sanctity, or of his labors in converting Indians to Presbyterian Christianity, or of his teaching them the ways of civilization; but because he saved Oregon to the United States, making a winter journey across the Continent to the East for that purpose in 1842-3, and bringing back with him in the summer of the latter year a thousand immigrants to Oregon. If this story were true, Dr. Whitman would deserve to be remembered most kindly by the people of the Northwest, and the whole country would unite in commending his patriotism and self-sacrifice.
But, if the story is true, there should be some record of his great services outside the writings of his panegyrists. If he brought such weighty reasons to President Tyler and Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, as to induce them to change the policy of the government, there should be a record of it somewhere. If be was a man of such force of character and intellectual power as to change the policy of states and nations in a visit of a few days to Washington, some one beside his fellow missionaries must have been aware of it and left a record throwing some light upon his character and services. Outside bis record as a missionary, and the fact of his making a winter Journey over the mountains from Oregon and of his return the next summer, history has little to say of the man or his services. His biographers have constructed a story about him to fit the history of the times, not so much to glorify Whitman, whose unfortunate murder by the Indians he had been instructing for eleven years aroused universal sympathy, as to gain sympathy for themselves and help to push forward their own schemes. To give the story a foundation, it had to be assumed that the Tyler administration was about to betray the interests of the country m the Pacific coast to England in return for some advantages obtained for the Eastern States; a pure invention, without any proof whatever to sustain it.
