miracle if he escaped death either from starving or freezing, or the savages, or the perishing of his horses, during the five months that would be required to make the only possible circuitous route, via Fort Hall, Taos, Santa Fé, and Bent Fort. His reply was that of my angel wife six years before: "I am ready, not to be bound only, but to die at Jerusalem or in the snows of the Rocky Mountains for the [p. 20] name of the Lord Jesus or my country. I am a missionary, it is true, but my country needs me now." And taking leave of his missionary associates, his comfortable home, and his weeping companion, with little hope of seeing them again in this world, he entered upon his fearful journey the 2d of October 1842, and reached the City of Washington the 2d of March 1843, with his face, nose, ears, hands, feet, and legs badly frozen. It is well that the good man did not live to see himself and his faithful associates robbed and their character slandered by that very Government he was ready to lay down his life for. It would have been to him, as it is to me, the most mournful event of my life. …
DR. WHITMAN'S SUCCESSFUL MISSION AT WASHINGTON.
On reaching the settlements. Dr. Whitman found that many of the now old Oregonians—Waldo, Applegate, Hamtree, Keyser, and others—who had once made calculations to come to Oregon, had abandoned the idea because of the representations from Washington that every attempt to take wagons and ox teams through the Rocky Mountains and Blue Mountains to the Columbia had failed. Dr. Whitman saw at once what the stopping of wagons at Fort Hall every year meant. The representations purported to come from Secretary Webster but really from Governor Simpson, who, magnifying the statements of his chief trader, Grant, at Fort Hall, declared the Americans must be going mad, from their repeated fruitless attempts to take wagons and teams through the impassable regions of the Columbia, and that the women and children of those wild fanatics had been saved from a terrible death only by the repeated and philanthropic labors of Mr. Grant, at Fort Hall, in furnishing them with horses. The doctor told these men as he met them that his only object in crossing the mountains in the dead of the winter, at the risk of his life, and through untold sufferings, was to take back an American emigration that summer through the mountains to the Columbia with their wagons and teams. The route was practicable. We had taken our cattle and our families through several years before. They had nothing to fear; but to be ready on his return. The stopping of wagons at Fort Hall was a Hudson Bay Company scheme to prevent the settling of the country by Americans, till they could settle it [p. 21] with their own subjects from the Selkirk settlement. This news spread like fire through Missouri, as will be seen from Zacrey's statement. The doctor pushed on to Washington and immediately sought an interview with Secretary Webster—both being from the same State—and stated to him the object of his crossing the mountains, and laid before him the great importance of
