on the subject of Catholicism. His repeated charges brought forth an answer from Brouillet the Vicar-General of Walla Walla,[1] and nine years later Brouillet's pamphlet was included by J. Ross Browne in an official report which he made on the causes of the Indian War in Oregon and Washington.[2]
Brouillet's reply is temperate in tone but makes assertions about the attitude of the Indians toward the Protestant missionaries and the causes of it, which the missionaries regarded as slanders. But to have this Catholic pamphlet distributed as a public document by the government incensed Spalding beyond endurance and roused him to ceaseless efforts to overwhelm the Catholics with obloquy.[3] By lecturing on the Protestant missions, the work of Whitman and the massacre, and by getting various religious bodies and groups of prominent men to pass resolutions drafted by himself he accumulated a mass of material which he got published under the title: Early Labors of the Missionaries of the American Board, etc., in Oregon, etc., as Executive Document 37 (Senate), 41st Congress, 3rd session. It was as an element in this extraordinary campaign of vindication that the legendary story of Whitman was developed.[4] Nothing could more effectively catch the public ear and prepare the public mind for resentment against the Catholics than to show that Whitman saved Oregon to the United States and then lost his life a sacrifice to the malignant disappointment of the "Jesuits" and the Hudson's Bay Company. This conjecture is very strongly supported by Spalding's allegation in his memorial "American Congress vs. Protestantism in Oregon." "That there is abundant proof to show that the said Whitman massacre and the long and expensive wars that followed were commenced by the above said British
- ↑ Protestantism in Oregon: Account of the Murder of Dr. Whitman and the Ungrateful Calumnies of H. H. Spalding, Protestant Missionary, by the Rev. J. B. A. Brouillet, N. Y., 1853. Brouillet had saved Spalding's life.
- ↑ Executive Docs. (House of Rep.), 35th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 38. Spalding's charges are quoted on pages 49–51.
- ↑ Spalding did not become aware of the republication of Brouillet's pamphlet for some years (Senate Ex. Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3rd Sess., p. 5).
- ↑ The date cannot be fixed with precision. Dr. Atkinson brought the story to Boston in 1865. Secretary Treat wrote Dr. Eells in consequence, Feb. 22, 1866. Bancroft says, I. 657, note: "In 1866–67 Spalding revived the memories of twenty years before, and delivered a course of lectures on the subject of the Waiilatpu mission which were published in the Albany (Or.) States Rights Democrat extending over a period from November 1866 to February 1867." But the lectures apparently began at least one year earlier, for in one of them printed in the Early Labors he says it is eighteen years since the massacre, which occurred in November, 1847. Exec. Doc. 37, p. 26.
Extracts from Spalding's lecture and from his memorial entitled "American Congress vs. Protestantism in Oregon" are given in the appendix to this article as "The Primary Source of the Whitman Legend." The date of the publication of Doc. 37 was 1871.
