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Nixon states that Lovejoy followed Whitman to St. Louis, and spent his time organizing an emigration to Oregon. Lovejoy does not say so. Lovejoy is entirely silent as to what he did or where he went between the time of parting with Whitman at Bent's Fort and meeting him again, he said, "near Laremie," but Barnett says at Green river, the next summer. There is no evidenoe, excepting that of John Zechery, that either Whitman or Lovejoy did anything to encourage emigration to Oregon in 1843.
John Zechery, who was in his seventeenth year when he accompanied his father to Oregon, in 1843, says that his father was induced to go to Oregon by reading a pamphlet describing that country written by Dr. Whitman. No such pamphlet has ever been found, and no one excepting Zechery has ever seen or heard of it. As Zechery made the statement over twenty years after he arrived in Oregon, it is evident that he was mistaken as to the author of the pamphlet. There were many publications, some of them in pamphlet form, setting forth the advantages of Oregon, as a place of settlement, but none have been found written by missionaries.
The causes of the emigration to Oregon, beginning in 1843, were the hard times following the panic of 1837 and the belief that the government would deal generously with the settlers there in giving them lands. The financial condition of many people in the west was deplorable. Jesse Applegate sold a "steamboat load of bacon and lard for $100." Burnett, who was a lawyer, went to Oregon because he never could pay his debts if he remained at home. The total number of emigrants to Oregon in 1843 has been estimated by emigrants from five hundred to one thousand. Whitman, in his letter to the secretary of war, put the number at one thousand, but that is too large an estimate.
The newspapers of that day make no mention of Whitman. It is strange that a man, who had resided as a missionary in Oregon for six years, could have made such an extraordinary journey and met so many people along the route, in Washington, Boston, in the States of New York and Illinois, and there be no mention of him or his work in the newspapers of that time.
Yet such is the case. Nile's Register is full of references to Oregon and of the emigration of 1843, but does not mention Whitman. Burnett and Daniel Waldo are the only ones who mention Whitman at the time of the starting of the emigrants. The latter fed him while the train was in Kansas, and again when it was on Snake river.
