How Marcus Whitman saved Oregon/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
BIOGRAPHICAL.—DR. MARCUS WHITMAN AND DR. JOHN McLOUGHLIN.
Dr. Marcus Whitman was a direct descendant of John Whitman of Weymouth, who came from England in the ship Confidence, December, 1638. Of him it is recorded that he feared God, hated covetousness and did good continually all the days of a long life.
Of the parents of Dr. Whitman, but little has been written. His father, Beza Whitman, was born in Bridgewater, Connecticut, May 13, 1775. In March, 1797, he married Alice Green, of Mumford, Connecticut. Two years later, with all of their worldly goods packed in an ox-cart, they moved to Rushville, New York, Mrs. Whitman making a large part of the tedious journey on foot, carrying her one-year-old babe in her arms.
Settled in their new home, with Indians for near neighbors and wilderness all about them, they began the struggle for life, and though no great success rewarded their efforts, it is known that 239 their doors always swung open to the needy and their hands ministered to the sick.
Mr. Whitman died April 7, 1810, at the early age of 35 years, leaving his young wife to rear their family of four sons and one daughter. Mrs. Whitman, though not a professing Christian, was a woman of much energy and great endurance which, combined with strong Christian principle, enabled her to look well to the ways of her household. She lived to see every member of it an active Christian. She died September 6th, 1857, aged 79, and was buried beside her husband near Rushville, New York.
Dr. Marcus was her second son, and inherited from her a strong frame and great endurance. After his father's death he was sent to his paternal grandfather, Samuel Whitman, of Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he remained ten years for training and education. There he received a liberal training in the best schools the place afforded, supplemented by a thorough course in Latin, and more advanced studies under the minister of the place.
We know little of the boyhood spent there, as we should know little of the whole life of Whitman, had not others lived to tell it, for he neither told or wrote of it; he was too modest and too busy for that. But we know it was the usual life of the Yankee boy, to bring the cows and milk them, to 240 cut the wood, and later to plow and sow the fields, as we afterward find he knew how to do all these things. The strong, sturdy boy of ceaseless activity and indomitable will who loved hunting and exploring, and a touch of wild life, must have sometimes given his old grandfather a trial of his mettle, but on the whole, no doubt, he was a great comfort and help to his declining years.
After the death of his grandfather, he returned to the home of his mother in Rushville. There he became a member of the Congregational Church at the age of nineteen, and it is said was very desirous of studying for the ministry, but by a long illness, and the persuasion of friends, was turned from his purpose to the study of medicine.
He took a three years' course, and graduated at Fairfield, in 1824. He first went to Canada, where he practiced his profession for four years, then came back to his home, determined again to take up the study for the ministry, but was again frustrated in his design, and practiced his profession four years more in Wheeler, N. Y., where he was a member and an elder in the Presbyterian Church. He and a brother also owned a saw-mill near there, where he assisted in his spare hours, and so learned another trade that was most useful to him in later life. In fact, as we see his environments in his Mission Station in Oregon, these 241 hard lessons of his earlier years seem to have been, in the best sense of the word, educational.
With but little help, he opened up and cultivated a great farm, and built a grist-mill and a saw-mill, and when his grist-mill was burned, built another, and, at the same time, attended to his professional duties that covered a wide district. It was the wonder of every visitor to the Mission how one man, with so few helpers, accomplished so much. At the time of the massacre, the main building of the Mission was one hundred feet in the front, with an L running back seventy feet, and part of it two stories high. Every visitor remarked on the cleanliness and comfort and thrift which everywhere appeared.
There are men who, with great incentives, have accomplished great things, but were utter failures when it came to practical, every-day duties. Dr. Whitman, with a genius to conceive, and the will and energy to carry out the most difficult and daring undertaking, was just as faithful and efficient in the little things that made up the comforts of his wilderness home. Seeing these grand results—the commodious house, the increase in the herds and the stacks of grain—seems to have only angered his lazy, thriftless Indians, and they began to make demands for a division of his wealth.
Dr. Whitman has been accused of holding his Indians to a too strict moral accountability; that 242 it would have been wiser to have been more lenient, and winked at, rather than denounced, some of their savage ways. Those who have carefully studied the man, know how impossible it would have been for him, in any seeming way, to condone a crime, or to purchase peace with the criminal by a bribe. This was the method of the Hudson Bay Company, and was doubtless the cheap way.
By a series of events and environments, he seems to have been trained much as Moses was, but with wholly different surroundings from those of the great Lawgiver, whose first training was in the Royal Court and the schools of Egypt; then in its army; then an outcast, and as a shepherd, guiding his flocks, and finding springs and pasturage in the land where, one day, he was to lead his people.
King David is another man made strong in the school of preparation. As he watched his flocks on the Judean hills, he fought the lion and the bear, and so was not afraid to meet and fight a giant, who defied the armies of the living God. It was there, under the stars, that he practiced music to quiet a mad king, and was educated into a fitness to organize the great choirs, and furnish the grand anthems for the temple worship. After this, in self-defense, he became the commander of 243 lawless bands of men, and so was trained to command the armies of Israel.
So it has been in our own Nation, with Washington and Lincoln, and Grant and Garfield; they had to pass through many hardships, and receive a many-sided training before they were fitted for the greater work to which they were called. So it was, this strong, conscientious, somewhat restless young man was being trained for the life that was to follow. The farmer boy, planting and reaping, the millwright planning and building, the country doctor on his long, lonely rides, the religious teacher who must oversee the physical and spiritual wants of his fellow church members, all were needed in the larger life for which he was longing and looking, when the sad appeal for the "Book of Life" came from the Indian Chiefs who had come so far, and failed to find it. His immediate and hearty response was, "Here am I, send me!"
Dr. Marcus Whitman, judged by his life as a Missionary, must ever be given due credit; for no man ever gave evidence of greater devotion to the work he found to do. He was doubtless excelled as a teacher of the Indians by many of his co-laborers. He was not, perhaps, even eminent as a teacher. His great reputation and the honor due him, does not rest upon such a claim, but upon his wisdom in seeing the future of the Great West, 244 and his heroic rescue of the land from a foreign rule. That he heard a call to the duty from a higher source than any earthly potentate, none but the skeptic will doubt. The act stands out clear and bold and strong, as one of the finest instances of unselfish patriotism recorded in all history.
DR. JOHN McLOUGHLIN.
Any sketch of pioneer Oregon would be incomplete without an honorable mention of Dr. John McLoughlin. He was the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Company, an organization inimical to American interests, both for pecuniary and political reasons, and like Whitman, has been maligned and misunderstood. As the leading spirit, during all the stages of pioneer life, his life and acts have an importance second to none. Nothing could have been more important for the comfort and peace of the Missionaries than to have had a man as Supreme Ruler of Oregon, with so keen a sense of justice, as had Dr. McLoughlin.
Physically he was a fine specimen of a man. He was six feet, four inches, and well-proportioned. His bushy white hair and massive beard, caused the Indians everywhere to call him, the "Great White Head Chief."
He was born in 1784, and was eighteen years 245 older than Dr. Whitman. He entered the Northwestern Fur Company's service in 1800. He afterward studied medicine, and for a time practiced his profession, but his fine business abilities were so apparent, that in 1824 we find him at the head of affairs in Oregon. His power over the rough men in the employ of the Company, and the savage tribes who filled their coffers with wealth, was so complete as to be phenomenal.
In many of the sketches we have shown that his kindness to the pioneer Missionaries in another and a higher sense, proved his manhood. To obey the orders of his company, and still remain a humane man, was something that required tact that few men could have brought to bear as well as Dr. McLoughlin. While he did slaughter, financially speaking, traders and fur gatherers right and left, and did his best to serve the pecuniary interests of his great monopoly, he drew the line there, and was the friend and the helper of the missionaries.
If the reader could glance through Mrs. Whitman's diary upon the very opening week of her arrival in Oregon, there would not be found anything but words of kindness and gratitude to Dr. McLoughlin. In justice to his company, to which he was always loyal, he pushed the Methodist missions far up the Willamette, and those of the American Board three hundred miles in another direction. But at the same time he was a friend and 246 brother and adviser, and anything he had was at their service, whether they had money or not.
After the immigration in 1842, and the larger immigration led by Whitman in 1843, the company in England became alarmed and sent out spies—Messrs. Park, Vavasaur and Peel, who were enjoined to find out whether McLoughlin was loyal to British interests. After many months spent in studying the situation, their adverse report is easily inferred from the fact that Dr. McLoughlin was ordered to report to headquarters. The full history of that secret investigation has never yet been revealed, but when it is, the whole blame will be found resting upon Whitman and his missionary co-workers, who wrested the land from English rule, and that Dr. McLoughlin aided them to success.
When the charge of "Friendship to the missionaries," was made, the old doctor flared up and replied: "What would you have? Would you have me turn the cold shoulder on the men of God who came to do that for the Indians which this company has neglected to do? If we had not helped the immigrants in '42 and '43 and '44, and relieved their necessities, Fort Vancouver would have been destroyed and the world would have treated us as our inhuman conduct deserved; every officer of the Company, from Governor down, would have 247 been covered with obloquy, and the Company's business ruined!"
But it all resulted in the resignation of Dr. McLoughlin. The injustice he received at the hands of Americans afterward, is deeply to be regretted, and it is greatly to the credit of the thinking people of the State of Oregon that they have done their best to remedy the wrong. At many times, and in a multitude of ways, Dr. McLoughlin, by his kindness to the missionaries, won for himself the gratitude of thinking Americans in all the years to come. With a bad man in his place as Chief Factor, the old missionaries would have found life in Oregon well-nigh unbearable. While true to the exclusive and selfish interests of the great monopoly he served, he yet refused to resort to any form of unmanliness.
After his abuse by the English company and his severance of all connection with it, he settled at Oregon City and lived and died an American citizen. The tongue of slander was freely wagged against him, and his declining years were made miserable by unthinking Americans and revengeful Englishmen. His property, of which he had been deprived, was returned to his heirs, and to-day his memory is cherished as among Oregon's benefactors. A fine oil painting of Dr. McLoughlin was secured and paid for by the old pioneers and presented to the State. 248
The Hon. John Minto, in making the address at the hanging of the picture, closed with these words:
"In this sad summary of such a life as Dr. McLoughlin's, there is a statement that merits our attention, which, if ever proven true, and no man who ever knew Dr. McLoughlin will doubt that he believed it true, namely, that he prevented war between Great Britain and the United States, will show that two of the greatest nations on this earth owe him a debt of gratitude, and that Oregon, in particular, is doubly bound to him as a public benefactor. British state papers may some day prove all this.
"It is now twenty-six years since the Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon, so far as restoration of property to Dr. McLouglin's family could undo the wrong of Oregon's Land Bill, gave gladness to the heart of every Oregon pioneer worthy of the name. All of them yet living, now know that, good man as they believed him, he was better than they knew. They see him now, after the strife and jealousies of race, national, business, and sectarian interests are allayed, standing in the center of all these causes of contention—a position in which to please all parties was impossible, to 'Maintain which, only a good man could bear with patience'—and they have adopted this means of conveying their appreciation of this great forbearance 249 and patient endurance, combined with his generous conduct.
"Looking, then,
at this line of action in the light of the merest glimpses of history, known to be true by witnesses living, can any honest man wonder that the pioneers of Oregon, who have eaten the salt of this man's hospitality, who have been the eye-witnesses to his brave care for humanity, and participators in his generous aid, are unwilling to go to their graves in silence—which would imply base ingratitude—a silence which would be eloquent with falsehood?
"Governor and Representatives of Oregon: In recognition of the worthy manner in which Dr. John McLoughlin filled his trying and responsible position, in the heartfelt glow of a grateful remembrance of his humane and noble conduct to them, the Oregon pioneers leave this portrait with you, hoping that their descendants will not forget the friend of their fathers, and trusting that this gift of the men and women who led the advance which has planted thirty thousand rifles in the Valley of the Columbia, and three hundred thousand, when needed, in the National Domain facing the Pacific Ocean, will be deemed worthy of a place in your halls."
DR. JOHN MCLOUGHLIN, Chief Factor of Hudson Bay Co., at Fort Walla Walla.