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been lain aside so far as that means might have been found to prevent the Doctor from ever reaching his destination.
She accuses him of giving Eells and Walker the slip, inasmuch as he started on the 3d instead of waiting until the 5th of October. The urgency of the case, as he deemed it, and the lateness of the season, would argue against a minute's unnecessary delay. With such a journey before her, and at such a time of year, would Mrs. Victor have delayed her starting for two days, just for the sake of making a mounted postoffice of herself? Then this (presumably) fair calumniator of the dead doubts that Whitman ever visited Washington. Why not doubt that he went to the States at all, as both propositions rest on the same foundation—the assertions of the Doctor and his then associates? The same reason that prevented his telling McKinlay where he was going would have prevented his telling him where he had been, after his return. He was living in an Indian country. The only authority respected by the Indians was that of the Hudson's Bay Company. To antagonize this com pany might have hastened the fate that finally befell him and his family.
She also tells us that on his departure Dr. Whitman confided his wife to the care of McKinlay. Did she receive it? Not long after his departure the mission mill was burned by Indians, and Mrs. Whitman was so threatened that she sought safety in flight—not to Fort Walla Walla, but to the Methodist Mission at The Dalles.
Now, let this writer of history, who "speculates" when she runs short of facts, indulge her penchant and speculate as to what that hidden, mysterious influence was that seemed to hang around Hudson's Bay Forts and made it the more dangerous for Protestant missionaries the nearer they were located to these forts. And I, in turn, will speculate, privately, as to what kind of a production we shall have, if, as I understand her to intimate, Mrs. F. F. Victor shall conclude to give us the "inside history of the Cayuse war." As literary curiosities, the writings of an author who dresses Col. Joseph L. Meek up in the paint and plumage of a hero, while she clothes Dr. Marcus Whitman in the garb of a scoundrel, they alone are valuable.
Time will vindicate Dr. Whitman, and when all calumnies, and their inventors, shall have been forgotten, his name, and that of his devoted, noble wife, will stand forth in history as martyrs to the cause of God and their country.
