THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE
THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE
THIS is the forgotten story of the greatest ride. The history of the nation has been punctuated with other great rides, it is true. Paul Revere rode thirty miles to rouse the Middlesex minutemen and save from capture the guns and powder stored at Concord; Sheridan rode the twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek and by his thunderous “Turn, boys, turn—we’re going back!” saved the battle—and the names of them both are immortalized in verse that is more enduring than iron. Whitman, the missionary, rode four thousand miles and saved us an empire, and his name is not known at all.
Though there were other actors in the great drama which culminated in the grim old preacher’s memorable ride—suave, frock-coated diplomats and furtive secret agents and sun-bronzed, leather-shirted frontiersmen and bearded factors of the fur trade—the story rightfully begins and ends with Indians. There were four of them, all chieftains, and the beaded patterns on their garmentsof fringed buckskin and the fashion in which they wore the feathers in their hair told the plainsmen as plainly as though they had been labelled that they were listened to with respect in the councils of the Flathead tribe, whose tepees were pitched in the far nor’west. They rode their lean and wiry ponies up the dusty, unpaved thoroughfare in St. Louis known as Broadway one afternoon in the late autumn of 1832. Though the St. Louis of three quarters of a century ago was but an outpost on civilization’s firing-line and its six thousand inhabitants were accustomed to seeing the strange, wild figures of the plains, the sudden appearance of these Indian braves, who came riding out of nowhere, clad in all the barbaric panoply of their rank, caused a distinct flutter of curiosity.
The news of their arrival being reported to General Clarke, the military commandant, he promptly assumed the ciceronage of the bewildered but impassive red men. Having, as it chanced, been an Indian commissioner in his earlier years, he knew the tribe well and could speak with them in their own guttural tongue. Beyond vouchsafing the information that they came from the upper reaches of the Columbia, from the country known as Oregon, and that they hadspent the entire summer and fall upon their journey, the Indians, with characteristic reticence, gave no explanation of the purpose of their visit. After some days had passed, however, they confided to General Clarke that rumors had filtered through to their tribe of the white man’s “Book of Life,” and that they had been sent to seek it. To a seasoned old frontiersman like the general, this was a novel proposition to come from a tribe of remote and untamed Indians. He treated the tribal commissioners, nevertheless, with the utmost hospitality, taking them to dances and such other entertainments as the limited resources of the St. Louis of those days permitted, and, being himself a devout Catholic, to his own church. Thus passed the winter, during which two of the chiefs died, as a result, no doubt, of the indoor life and the unaccustomed richness of the food. When the tawny prairies became polka-dotted with bunch-grass in the spring, the two survivors made preparations for their departure, but, before they left, General Clarke, who had taken a great liking to these dignified and intelligent red men, insisted on giving them a farewell banquet. After the dinner the elder of the chiefs was called upon for a speech. You must picture him as standing with folded arms, tall, straightand of commanding presence, at the head of the long table, a most dramatic and impressive figure in his garments of quill-embroidered buckskin, with an eagle feather slanting in his hair. He spoke with the guttural but sonorous eloquence of his people, and after each period General Clarke translated what he had said to the attentive audience of army officers, government officials, priests, merchants, and traders who lined the table.
“I have come to you, my brothers,” he began, “over the trail of many moons from out of the setting sun. You were the friends of my fathers, who have all gone the long way. I have come with an eye partly open for my people, who sit in darkness. I go back with both eyes closed. How can I go back blind, to my blind people? I made my way to you with strong arms through many enemies and strange lands that I might carry much back to them. I go back with both arms broken and empty. Two fathers came with us; they were the braves of many winters and wars. We leave them asleep here by your great water and wigwams. They were tired in many moons, and their moccasins wore out.
“My people sent me to get the white man’s Book of Life. You took me to where you allowyour women to dance as we do not ours, and the Book was not there. You took me to where they worship the Great Spirit with candles, and the Book was not there. You showed me images of the good spirits and pictures of the good land beyond, but the Book was not among them to tell us the way. I am going back the long and sad trail to my people in the dark land. You make my feet heavy with gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them; yet the Book is not among them. When I tell my poor, blind people, after one more snow, in the big council that I did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go on a long path to other hunting-grounds. No white man will go with them and no white man’s Book to make the way plain. I have no more words.”
Just as the rude eloquence of the appeal touched the hearts of the frontier dwellers who sat about the table in St. Louis, so, when it was translated and published in the Eastern papers, it touched the hearts and fired the imaginations of the nation. In a ringing editorialThe Christian Advocateasked: “Who will respond to go beyond theRocky Mountains and carry the Book of Heaven?” And this was the cue for the missionary whose name was Marcus Whitman to set foot upon the boards of history.
His preparation for a frontiersman’s life began early for young Whitman. Born in Connecticut when the eighteenth century had all but run its course, he was still in his swaddling-clothes when his parents, falling victims to the prevalent fever for “going west,” piled their lares and penates into an ox-cart and trekked overland to the fertile lake region of central New York, Mrs. Whitman making the four-hundred-mile journey on foot, with her year-old babe in her arms. Building a cabin with the tree trunks cleared from the site, they began the usual pioneer’s struggle for existence. His father dying before he had reached his teens, young Marcus was sent to live with his grandfather in Plainfield, Mass., where he remained ten years, learning his “three R’s” in such schools as the place afforded, his education later being taken in hand by the local parson. His youth was passed in the usual life of the country boy; to drive home the cows and milk them, to chop the wood and carry the water and do the other household chores, and, later on, to plough and plant the fields—a training which wasto prove invaluable to him in after years, on the shores of another ocean. I expect that the strong, sturdy boy of ceaseless activity and indomitable will—the Plainfield folk called him mischievous and stubborn—who was fonder of hunting and fishing than of algebra and Greek, must have caused his old grandfather a good deal of worry; though, from all I can learn, he seems to have been a straightforward and likable youngster. Very early he set his heart on entering the ministry; but, owing to the dissuasions of his relatives and friends, who knew how pitifully meagre was a clergyman’s living in those days, he reluctantly abandoned the idea and took up instead the study of medicine. After practising in Canada for several years, he returned to central New York, where, with but little help, he chopped a farm out of the wilderness, cleared it, and cultivated it, built a grist-mill and a sawmill, and at the same time acted as physician for a district fifty miles in radius. He was in the heyday of life, prosperous, and engaged to the prettiest girl in all the countryside, when, reading in the local paper the appeal made by the Indian chieftains in far-away St. Louis, the old crusading fervor that had first turned his thoughts toward the ministry, flamed up clear and strong within him,and, putting comfort, prosperity, everything behind him, he applied to the American Board for appointment as a missionary to Oregon. Such a request from a man so peculiarly qualified for a wilderness career as Whitman could not well be disregarded, and in due time he received an appointment to go to the banks of the Columbia, investigate, return, and report. The wish of his life had been granted: he had become a skirmisher in the army of the church.
Accompanied by a fellow missionary, Whitman penetrated into the Western wilderness as far as the Wind River Mountains, near the present Yellowstone Park. After familiarizing themselves through talks with traders, trappers, and Indians with the conditions which prevailed in the valley of the Columbia, Whitman and his companion returned to Boston, and upon the strength of their report the American Board decided to lose no time in occupying the field. Ordered to establish a station on the Columbia, in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla, then a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Whitman turned the long and arduous trip across the continent into a wedding journey. The conveyances used and the roundabout route taken by the bridal couple strikingly emphasize the primitive internal communicationsof the period. They drove in a sleigh from Elmira, N. Y., to Hollidaysburg, a hamlet on the Pennsylvania Canal, at the foot of the Alleghanies, the canal-boats, which were built in sections, being taken over the mountains on a railway. Travelling by the canal and its communicating waterways to the Ohio, they journeyed by steamboat down the Ohio to its junction with the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence up the Missouri to Council Bluffs, where they bought a wagon (bear that wagon in mind, if you please, for you shall hear of it later on), and outfitted for the journey across the plains. Accompanied by another missionary couple, Doctor and Mrs. Spalding, they turned the noses of their mules northwestward and a week or so later caught up with an expedition sent out by the American Fur Company to its settlement of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia. Following the North Fork of the Platte, they crossed the Wind River Mountains within sight of the landmark which came in time to be known as Frémont’s Peak, though these two young women crossed the Great Divide six years before Frémont, “the pathfinder,” ever set eyes upon it. Few women of our race have ever made so perilous or difficult a journey. Before it was half completed,the party, owing to a miscalculation, ran out of flour and for weeks on end were forced to live on jerked buffalo meat and tea. Crossing the Snake River at a point where it was upward of a mile in width, the wagon was capsized by the velocity of the current, and, the mules, on which the women had been put for safety, becoming entangled in the harness, their riders escaped drowning by what the missionaries devoutly ascribed to a miracle and the rough-spoken frontiersmen to “damned good luck.” Another river they crossed by means of a dried elkskin with two ropes attached, on which they lay flat and perfectly motionless while two Indian women, holding the ropes in their teeth, swam the stream, drawing this unstable ferry behind them.
At Fort Hall, near the present site of Pocatello, Ida., they came upon the southernmost of that chain of trading-posts with which the Hudson’s Bay Company sought to guard the enormous territory which, without so much as a “by-your-leave,” it had taken for its own. Here Captain Grant, the company’s factor, made a determined effort to induce Whitman to abandon the wagon that he had brought with him across the continent in the face of almost insuperable obstacles.But the obstinacy that had caused the folks in Plainfield to shake their heads when the name of young Marcus Whitman was mentioned stood him in good stead, for the more persistent the Englishman became in his objections the more adamantine grew the American in his determination to cling at all costs to his wagon, for no one knew better than Whitman that this had proved the most successful of the methods pursued by the great British fur monopoly to discourage the colonization of the territory wherein it conducted its operations. The officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company well knew that the colonization of the valley of the Columbia by Americans meant not only the end of their enormously profitable monopoly but the end of British domination in that region. Though they did not have it in their power to forcibly prevent Americans from entering the country, they argued that there could be no colonization on a large scale unless the settlers had wagons in which to transport their seeds and farming implements. Hence the company adopted the policy of stationing its agents along the main routes of travel with instructions to stop at nothing short of force to detain the wagons. And until Marcus Whitman came this policy had accomplished the desired result, thespecious arguments of Captain Grant having proved so successful, indeed, that the stockade at Fort Hall was filled with abandoned wagons and farming implements which would have been of inestimable value to the settlers who had been persuaded or bullied into leaving them behind. But Whitman was made of different stuff, and the English official might as well have tried to argue the Snake River out of its course as to argue this hard-headed Yankee into giving up his wagon. Though it twice capsized and was all but lost in the swollen streams, though once it fell over a precipice and more than once went rolling down a mountainside, though for miles on end it was held on the narrow, winding mountain trails by means of drag-ropes, and though it became so dilapidated in time that it finished its journey on two wheels instead of four, the ramshackle old vehicle, thanks to Whitman’s bulldog grit and determination, was hauled over the mountains and was the first vehicle to enter the forbidden land. I have laid stress upon this incident of the wagon, because, as things turned out, it proved a vital factor in the winning of Oregon. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” runs the ancient doggerel; “for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost;for want of a rider the kingdom was lost.” And, had it not been for this decrepit old wagon of Whitman’s, a quarter of a million square miles of the most fertile land between the oceans would have been lost to the Union.
Seven months after helping his bride into the sleigh at Elmira, Whitman drove his gaunt mule-team into the gate of the stockade at Fort Walla Walla. To-day one can make that same journey in a little more than four days and sit in a green plush chair all the way. The news of Whitman’s coming had preceded him, and an enormous concourse of Indians, arrayed in all their barbaric finery, was assembled to greet the man who had journeyed so many moons to bring them the white man’s Book of Heaven. Picture that quartet of missionaries—skirmishers of the church, pickets of progress, advance-guards of civilization—as they stood on the banks of the Columbia one September morning in 1836 and consulted as to how to begin the work they had been sent to do. It was all new. There were no precedents to guide them. How would you begin, my friends, were you suddenly set down in the middle of a wilderness four thousand miles from home, with instructions to Christianize and civilize the savages who inhabited it?
Whitman, in whom diplomacy lost an adept when he became a missionary, appreciated that the first thing for him to do, if he was to be successful in his mission, was to win the confidence of the ruling powers of Oregon—the Hudson’s Bay Company officials at Fort Vancouver. This necessitated another journey of three hundred miles, but it could be made in canoes with Indian paddlers. Doctor McLoughlin, the stern old Scotchman who was chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and whose word was law throughout a region larger than all the States east of the Mississippi put together, had to be able, from the very nature of his business, to read the characters of men as students read a book; and he was evidently pleased with what he read in the face of the American missionary, for he gave both permission and assistance in establishing a mission station at Waiilatpui, twenty-five miles from Walla Walla.
Whitman’s first move in his campaign for the civilization of the Indians was to induce them to build permanent homes and to plough and sow. This the Hudson’s Bay officials had always discouraged. They did not want their savage allies to be transformed into tillers of the soil; they wanted them to remain nomads and hunters,ready to move hundreds of miles in quest of furs. The only parallel in modern times to the greed, selfishness, and cruelty which characterized the administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company was the rule of the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola and of King Leopold in the Congo.
At this time Oregon was a sort of no man’s land, to which neither England nor the United States had laid definite claim, though the former, realizing the immensity of its natural resources and the enormous strategic value that would accrue from its possession, had long cast covetous eyes upon it. The Americans of that period, on the contrary, knew little about Oregon and cared less, regarding the proposals for its acquisition with the same distrust with which the Americans of to-day regard any suggestion for extending our boundaries below the Rio Grande. Daniel Webster had said on the floor of the United States Senate: “What do we want with this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie-dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow? Whatcan we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, and uninviting, and not a harbor on it? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston.”
The name Oregon, it must be borne in mind, had a very much broader significance then than now, for the territory generally considered to be referred to by the term comprised the whole of the present States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and a portion of Montana.
Notwithstanding the systematic efforts of the Hudson’s Bay Company to keep them out, a considerable number of Americans—perhaps two or three hundred in all—had settled in the country watered by the Columbia, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Canadians and British, who held the balance of power. The American settlers believed that, under the terms of the treaty of 1819, whichever nation settled and organized the territory that nation would hold it. Though this was not directly affirmed in the terms of that treaty, it was the common sentiment of the statesmen of the period, Webster, then Secretary of State, having said, in the course of a letter to the British minister at Washington: “The ownershipof the whole country (Oregon) will likely follow the greater settlement and larger amount of population.” The missionaries, recognizing the incalculable value of the country which the American Government was deliberately throwing away, did everything in their power to encourage immigration. Their glowing accounts of the fertility of the soil, the balmy climate, the wealth of timber, the incalculable water-power, the wealth in minerals had each year induced a limited number of daring souls to make the perilous and costly journey across the plains. In the autumn of 1842 a much larger party than any that had hitherto attempted the journey—one hundred and twenty in all—reached Waiilatpui. Among them was a highly educated and unusually well-informed man—General Amos Lovejoy. He was thoroughly posted in national affairs, and it was in the course of a conversation with him that Doctor Whitman first learned that the Webster-Ashburton treaty would probably be ratified before the adjournment of Congress in the following March. It was generally believed that this treaty related to the entire boundary between the United States and England’s North American possessions, the popular supposition being that it provided for the cession of the Oregon region to Great Britainin return for fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland.
Doctor Whitman instantly saw that, as a result of the incredible ignorance and short-sightedness of the statesmen—or rather, the politicians who paraded as statesmen—at Washington, four great States were quietly slipping away from us without a protest. There was but one thing to do in such a crisis. He must set out for Washington. Though four thousand miles of Indian-haunted wilderness lay between him and the white city on the Potomac, he did not hesitate. Though winter was at hand, and the passes would be deep in snow and the plains destitute of pasturage, he did not falter. Though there was a rule of the American Board that no missionary could leave his post without obtaining permission from headquarters in Boston, Whitman shouldered all the responsibility. “I did not expatriate myself when I became a missionary,” was his reply to some objection. “Even if the Board dismisses me, I will do what I can to save Oregon to the nation. My life is of but little worth if I can keep this country for the American people.”[E]
Whitman’s friends in Oregon felt that he was starting on a ride into the valley of the shadow of death. They knew from their own experiences the terrible hardships of such a journey even in summer, when there was grass to feed the horses and men could live with comfort in the open air. It was resolved that he must not make the journey alone, and a call was made for a volunteer to accompany him. General Amos Lovejoy stepped forward and said quietly: “I will go with Doctor Whitman.” The doctor planned to start in five days, but, while dining with the Hudson’s Bay officials at Fort Walla Walla, an express messenger of the company arrived from Fort Colville, three hundred and fifty miles up the Columbia, and electrified his audience by announcing that a party of one hundred and forty British and Canadian colonists were on the road to Oregon. A young English clergyman, carried away with enthusiasm, sprang to his feet, waved his napkin above his head and shouted: “We’ve got the country—theYankees are too late! Hurrah for Oregon!” Whitman, appreciating that things had now reached a pass where even hours were precious, quietly excused himself, hurried back to the mission at Waiilatpui, and made preparations for an immediate departure. The strictest secrecy was enjoined upon all the Americans whom Whitman had taken into his confidence, for had a rumor of his intentions reached British ears at this juncture it might have ruined everything. So it was given out that he was returning to Boston to advise the American Board against the contemplated removal of its missions in Oregon—an explanation which was true as far as it went.
On the morning of October 3, 1842, Whitman, saying good-by to his wife and home, climbed into his saddle and with General Lovejoy, their half-breed guide, and three pack-mules set out on the ride that was to win us an empire. The little group of American missionaries and settlers whom he left behind gave him a rousing cheer as he rode off and then stood in silence with choking throats and misted eyes until the heroic doctor and his companions were swallowed by the forest.
With horses fresh, they reached Fort Hall in eleven days, where the English factor, Captain Grant—the same man who, six years before, hadattempted to prevent Whitman from taking his wagon into Oregon—doubtless guessing at their mission, did his best to detain them. Learning at Fort Hall that the northern tribes were on the war-path, Whitman and his companions struck southward in the direction of Great Salt Lake, planning to work from there eastward, via Fort Uintah and Fort Uncompahgre, to Santa Fé, and thence by the Santa Fé trail to St. Louis, which was on the borders of civilization. The journey from Fort Hall to Fort Uintah was one long nightmare, the temperature falling at times to forty degrees below zero and the snow being so deep in places that the horses could scarcely struggle through. While crossing the mountains on their way to Taos they were caught in a blinding snow-storm, in which, with badly frozen limbs, they wandered aimlessly for hours. Finally, upon the guide admitting that he was lost and could go no farther, they sought refuge in a deep ravine. Whitman dismounted and, kneeling in the snow, prayed for guidance. Can’t you picture the scene: the lonely, rock-walled gorge; the shivering animals standing dejectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing; the general, muffled to the eyes in furs; the impassive, blanketed half-breed; in the centre, upon his knees, theindomitable missionary, praying to the God of storms; and the snowflakes falling swiftly, silently, upon everything? As though in answer to the doctor’s prayers—and who shall say that it was not—the lead-mule, which had been left to himself, suddenly started plunging through the snowdrifts as though on an urgent errand. Whereupon the guide called out: “This old mule’ll find the way back to camp if he kin live long ’nough to git there.” And he did.
The next morning the guide said flatly that he would go no farther.
“I know this country,” he declared, “an’ I know when things is possible an’ when they ain’t. It ain’t possible to git through, an’ it’s plumb throwin’ your lives away to try it. I’m finished.”
This was a solar-plexus blow for Whitman, for he was already ten days behind his schedule. But, though staggered, he was far from being beaten. Telling Lovejoy to remain in camp and recuperate the animals—which he did by feeding them on brush and the inner bark of willows, for there was no other fodder—Whitman turned back to Fort Uncompahgre, where he succeeded in obtaining a stouter-hearted guide. In a week he had rejoined Lovejoy. The storm had ceased, and with rested animals they made good progressover the mountains to the pyramid pueblo of Taos, the home of Kit Carson. Tarrying there but a few hours, worn and weary though they were, they pressed on to the banks of the Red River, a stream which is dangerous even in summer, only to find a fringe of solid ice upon each shore, with a rushing torrent, two hundred feet wide, between. For some minutes the guide studied it in silence. “It is too dangerous to cross,” he said at last decisively.
“Dangerous or not, wemustcross it, and at once,” answered Whitman. Cutting a stout willow pole, eight feet or so in length, he put it on his shoulder and remounted.
“Now, boys,” he ordered, “shove me off.” Following the doctor’s directions, Lovejoy and the guide urged the trembling beast onto the slippery ice and then gave him a sudden shove which sent him, much against his will, into the freezing water. Both horse and rider remained for a moment out of sight, then rose to the surface well toward the middle of the stream, the horse swimming desperately. As they reached the opposite bank the doctor’s ingenuity in providing himself with the pole quickly became apparent, for with it he broke the fringe of ice and thus enabled his exhausted horse to gain a footingand scramble ashore. Wood was plentiful, and he soon had a roaring fire. In a wild country, when the lead-animal has gone ahead the others will always follow, so the general and the guide had no great difficulty in inducing their horses and pack-mules to make the passage of the river, rejoining Whitman upon the opposite bank.
Despite the fact that they found plenty of wood along the route that they had taken, which was fully a thousand miles longer than the northern course would have been, all the party were severely frozen, Whitman suffering excruciating pain from his frozen ears, hands, and feet. The many delays had not only caused the loss of precious time, but they had completely exhausted their provisions. A dog had accompanied the party, and they ate him. A mule came next, and that kept them until they reached Santa Fé, where there was plenty. Santa Fé—that oldest city of European occupation on the continent—welcomed and fed them. From there over the famous Santa Fé trail to Bent’s Fort, a fortified settlement on the Arkansas, was a long journey but, compared with what they had already gone through, an easy one. A long day’s ride northeastward from this lonely outpost of American civilization, and they found across their path atributary of the Arkansas. On the opposite shore was wood in plenty. On their side there was none, and the river was frozen over with smooth, clear ice, scarce strong enough to hold a man. They must have wood or they would perish from the cold; so Whitman, taking the axe, lay flat upon the ice and snaked himself across, cut a sufficient supply of fuel and returned the way he went, pushing it before him. While he was cutting it, however, an unfortunate incident occurred: the axe-helve was splintered. This made no particular difference at the moment, for the doctor wound the break in the handle with a thong of buckskin. But as they were in camp that night a famished wolf, attracted by the smell of the fresh buckskin, carried off axe and all, and they could find no trace of it. Had it happened a few hundred miles back it would have meant the failure of the expedition, if not the death of Whitman and his companions. On such apparently insignificant trifles do the fate of nations sometimes hang.
Crossing the plains of what are now the States of Oklahoma and Kansas, great packs of gaunt, gray timber-wolves surrounded their tent each night and were kept at bay only at the price of unceasing vigilance, one member of the party alwaysremaining on guard with a loaded rifle. The moment a wolf was shot its famished companions would pounce upon it and tear it to pieces. From Bent’s Fort to St. Louis was, strangely enough, one of the most dangerous portions of the journey, for, while heretofore the chief dangers had come from cold, starvation, and savage beasts, here they were in hourly danger from still more savage men, for in those days the Santa Fé trail was frequented by bandits, horse-thieves, renegade Indians, fugitives from justice, and the other desperate characters who haunted the outskirts of civilization and preyed upon the unprotected traveller. Notwithstanding these dangers, of which he had been repeatedly warned at Santa Fé and Bent’s Fort, the doctor, leaving Lovejoy and the guide to follow him with the pack-animals, pushed on through this perilous region alone, but lost his way and spent two precious days in finding it again—a punishment, he said for having travelled on the Sabbath.
The only occasion throughout all his astounding journey when this man of iron threatened to collapse was when, upon reaching St. Louis, in February, 1843, he learned, in answer to his eager inquiries, that the Ashburton treaty had been signed on August 9, long before he left Oregon,and that it had been ratified by the Senate on November 10, while he was floundering in the mountain snows near Fort Uncompahgre. For a moment the missionary’s mahogany-tanned face went white and his legs threatened to give way beneath him. Could it be that this was the end of his dream of national expansion? Was it possible that his heroic ride had been made for naught? But summoning up his courage he managed to ask: “Is the question of the Oregon boundary still open?” When he learned that the treaty had only settled the question of a few square miles in Maine, and that the matter of the northwest boundary was still pending, the revulsion was so great that he reeled and nearly fell. God be praised! There was still time for him to get to Washington! The river was frozen and he had to depend upon the stage, and an overland journey from St. Louis to Washington in midwinter was no light matter. But to Whitman with muscles like steel springs, a thousand miles by stage-coach over atrocious roads was not an obstacle worthy of discussion.
He arrived at Washington on the 3d of March—just five months from the Columbia to the Potomac—in the same rough garments he had worn upon his ride, for he had neither time nor opportunityto get others. Soiled and greasy buckskin breeches, sheepskinchaparejos, fleece side out, boot-moccasins of elkskin, a cap of raccoon fur with the tail hanging down behind, frontier fashion, and a buffalo greatcoat with a hood for stormy weather, composed a costume that did not show one inch of woven fabric. His face, storm-tanned to the color of a much-smoked meerschaum, carried all the iron-gray whiskers that five months’ absence from a razor could put upon it. I doubt, indeed, if the shop-windows of the national capital have ever reflected a more picturesque or striking figure. But he had no time to take note of the sensation created in the streets of Washington by his appearance. Would he be granted an audience with the President? Would he be believed? Would his mission prove successful? Those were the questions that tormented him.
Those were days when the chief executive of the nation was hedged by less formality than he is in these busier times, and President Tyler promptly received him. Some day, perhaps, the people of one of those great States which he saved to the Union will commission a famous artist to paint a picture of that historic meeting: the President, his keen, attentive face framed bythe flaring collar and high black stock of the period, sitting low in his great armchair; the great Secretary of State, his mane brushed back from his tremendous forehead, seated beside him; and, standing before them, the preacher-pioneer, bearded to the eyes, with frozen limbs, in his worn and torn garments of fur and leather, pleading for Oregon. The burden of his argument was that the treaty of 1819 must be immediately abrogated and that the authority of the United States be extended over the valley of the Columbia. He painted in glowing words the limitless resources, the enormous wealth in minerals and timber and water-power of this land beyond the Rockies; he told his hearers, spellbound now by the interest and vividness of the narrative, of the incredible fertility of the virgin soil, in which anything would grow; of the vastness of the forests; of the countless leagues of navigable rivers; of the healthful and delightful climate; of the splendid harbors along the coast; and last, but by no means least, of those hardy pioneers who had gone forth to settle this rich new region at peril of their lives and who, through him, were pleading to be placed under the shadow of their own flag.
But Daniel Webster still clung obstinately tohis belief that Oregon was a wilderness not worth the having.
“It is impossible to build a wagon road over the mountains,” he asserted positively. “My friend Sir George Simpson, the British minister, has told me so.”
“Thereisa wagon road over the mountains, Mr. Secretary,” retorted Whitman, “for I have made it.”
It was the rattletrap old prairie-schooner that the missionary had dragged into Oregon on two wheels in the face of British opposition that clinched and copper-riveted the business. It knocked all the argument out of the famous Secretary, who, for almost the first time in his life, found himself at a loss for an answer. Here was a man of a type quite different from any that Webster had encountered in all his political experience. He had no axe to grind; he asked for nothing; he wanted no money, or office, or lands, or anything except that which would add to the glory of the flag, the prosperity of the people, the wealth of the nation. It was a powerful appeal to the heart of President Tyler.
“What you have told us has interested me deeply, Doctor Whitman,” said the President at length. “Now tell me exactly what it is that you wish me to do.”
“If it is true, Mr. President,” replied Whitman, “that, as Secretary Webster himself has said, ‘the ownership of Oregon is very likely to follow the greater settlement and the larger amount of population,’ then all I ask is that you won’t barter away Oregon or permit of British interference until I can organize a company of settlers and lead them across the plains to colonize the country. And this I will try to do at once.”
“Your credentials as a missionary vouch for your character, Doctor Whitman,” replied the President. “Your extraordinary ride and your frostbitten limbs vouch for your patriotism. The request you make is a reasonable one. I am glad to grant it.”
“That is all I ask,” said Whitman, rising.
The object that had started him on his four-thousand-mile journey having been attained, Whitman wasted no time in resting. His work was still unfinished. It was up to him to get his settlers into Oregon, for the increasing arrogance of the Hudson’s Bay Company confirmed him in his belief that the sole hope of saving the valley of the Columbia lay in a prompt and overwhelming American immigration. He had, indeed, arrived at Washington in the very nick of time, for, if prior to his arrival the British Governmenthad renewed its offer of compromising by taking as the international boundary the forty-ninth parallel to the Columbia and thence down that river to the Pacific—thus giving the greater part of the present State of Washington to England—there is but little doubt that the offer would have been accepted. But the promise made by President Tyler to Whitman committed him against taking any action.
Though Whitman was treated with respect and admiration by the President of the United States, the greeting he received when he reported himself at the headquarters of the American Board in Boston was far from being a cordial one.
“What are you doing here, away from your post without permission?” curtly inquired the secretary of the Board, eying his shaggy visitor with evident disapproval.
“I came on business to Washington,” answered Whitman, looking the secretary squarely in the eye. “There was imminent danger of Oregon passing into the possession of England, and I felt it my duty to do what I could to prevent it.”
“Obtaining new territories for the nation is no part of our business,” was the ungracious answer. “You would have done better not to have meddled in political affairs. Here, take some moneyand get some decent clothes, and then we’ll discuss this scheme of yours of piloting emigrants over the mountains.”
Meanwhile General Lovejoy had been busy upon the frontier spreading the news that early in the spring Doctor Whitman and himself would guide a body of settlers across the Rockies to Oregon. The news spread up and down the border like fire in dry grass. The start was to be made from Weston, not far from where Kansas City now stands, and soon the emigrants came pouring in—men who had fought the Indians and the wilderness all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf; men who had followed Boone and Bowie and Carson and Davy Crockett; a hardy, sturdy, tenacious breed who were quite ready to fight, if need be, to hold this northwestern land where they had determined to build their homes. The grass was late, that spring of 1843, and the expedition did not get under way until the last week in June. At Fort Hall they met with the customary discouragements and threats from Captain Grant, but Whitman, like a modern Moses, urged them forward. On pushed the winding train of white-topped wagons, crossing the sun-baked prairies, climbing the Rockies, fording the intervening rivers, creeping along theedge of perilous precipices, until at last they stood upon the summit of the westernmost range, with the promised land lying spread below them. Whitman, the man to whom it was all due, reined in his horse and watched the procession of wagons, bearing upward of a thousand men, women, and children, make its slow progress down the mountains. He must have been very happy, for he had added the great, rich empire which the term Oregon implied to the Union.[F]
For four years more Doctor Whitman continued his work of caring for the souls and the bodies of red men and white alike at the mission station of Waiilatpui. On August 6, 1846, as a direct result of his great ride, was signed the treaty whereby England surrendered her claims to Oregon. In those days news travelled slowly along the frontier, and it was the following spring before the British outposts along the Columbia learned that the British minister at Washington had been beaten by the diplomacy of a Yankee missionary and that the great, despotic company which for well-nightwo centuries had been in undisputed control of this region, and which had come to regard it as inalienably its own, would have to move on. From that moment Marcus Whitman was a doomed man, for it was a long-standing boast of the company that no man defied it—and lived.
The end came with dramatic suddenness. Early in the afternoon of November 20, 1847, Doctor Whitman was sitting in the mission station prescribing medicine, as was his custom, for those of his Indians who were ailing, when a blanketed warrior stole up behind him on silent moccasins and buried a hatchet in his brain. Then hell broke loose. Whooping fiends in paint and feathers appeared as from the pit. Mrs. Whitman was butchered as she knelt by her dying husband, their scalps being torn from their heads before they had ceased to breathe. Fourteen other missionaries were murdered by the red-skinned monsters and forty women and children were carried into a captivity that was worse than death. And this by the Indians who, just fifteen years before, had pleaded to have sent them the white man’s Book of Heaven! Though no conclusive proof has ever been produced that they were whooped on to their atrocious deed by emissaries of the great monopoly which had beenforced out of Oregon as a result of Whitman’s ride, there is but little doubt. Whitman had snatched an empire from its greedy fingers, and he had to pay the price.
Within sight of the mission station, where for more than a decade they had worked together, and from which he had started on his historic ride, the martyr and his courageous wife lie buried. You can see the grave for yourself should your travels take you Walla Walla way. You will need to have it pointed out to you, however, for you would never notice it otherwise: a modest headstone surrounded by a picket fence. Though Marcus Whitman added to the national domain a territory larger and possessing greater natural resources than the German Empire, though but for him Portland and Tacoma and Seattle and Spokane would be British instead of American, no memorial of him can be found in their parks or public buildings. Instead of honoring the man who discovered the streams and forests from which they are growing rich, who won for them the very lands on which they dwell, unworthy discussions and acrimonious debates as to the motives which animated him are the only tributes which have been paid him by the people for whom he did so much. But he sleeps peacefully on beside themighty river, oblivious to the pettiness and ingratitude of it all. When history grants Marcus Whitman the tardy justice of perspective, over that lonely grave a monument worthy of a nation builder shall rise.