insignificant items of Oregon news, or in the Washington correspondence of the Tribune or the Journal of Commerce, Curtis's Webster and Webster's Private Correspondence are alike silent. Interested as John Quincy Adams was in all diplomatic matters, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, watchful and suspicious of the administration, his voluminous Diary knows nothing of Marcus Whitman. Equally devoid of light are Benton's Thirty Years' View, although Benton was a champion of Oregon, and Greenhow's History of Oregon, although Greenhow was a translator in the State Department and an indefatigable collector of information about Oregon.[1] The Life and Speeches of Senator Linn, of Missouri, who was the most advanced leader of the Oregon party, make no reference to Whitman. Tyler's Tyler lacks any contemporary reference to Whitman's presence in Washington, and if the author had found any he would have given it because he makes some conjectures as to the origin of the notion that Whitman exerted any influence on the diplomacy of that year.[2] Had Whitman
- ↑ Greenhow's preface is dated February, 1844. He devotes twenty-five pages to the Oregon Question in 1843 and half a page to the Emigration of that year, p. 391. It is possible that the following note on p. 396 may refer to Whitman. "A worthy missionary, now established on the Columbia, while acknowledging, in conversation with the author, the many acts of kindness received by him from the Hudson's Bay Company's agents, at the same time declared—that he would not buy a skin to make a cap, without their consent."
- ↑ L. G. Tyler's Letters and Times of the Tylers, II, 439. In the appendix pp. 692–699 is a letter from Dr. Silas Reed under date of April 8, 1885, which twice makes mention of Whitman's visit to Washington, but says nothing further than that he "furnished valuable data about Oregon and the practicability of a wagon route thereto across the mountains," p. 697.
That Whitman did press this point about the practicability of a wagon route is rendered probable by the tone of a sentence in his letter to the Secretary of War in regard to the immigration of 1843: "they have practically demonstrated that wagons drawn by horses or oxen can cross the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, contrary to all the sinister assertions of all those who pretended it to be impossible." (Nixon, 316–17). Yet too much stress cannot be laid on Dr. Reed's testimony, as he was an old man in 1885 and made several mistakes in his letter, of which a significant one is the apparent confusion between Dr. White and Dr. Whitman. On p. 696, he says, writing of the spring of 1842: "From Dr. Whitman, a missionary to Oregon much useful information for emigrants and the
