to gratify such curiosity but to illustrate the way in which this history as a whole was manufactured, and, in particular, its late origin. Spalding, Gray, Eells, and the others who accepted the story, it must be remembered, had little knowledge of American history and few books. Such information as they possessed was the residuum left in their memory from conversation and the reading of newspapers. As time goes on, without the aid of books, the events of different years run together and a man recollects impressions and political gossip without any definite knowledge as to their succession in time.
In 1865 they recollected that they had heard that Sir George Simpson was or had been in Washington in the interest of the Hudson's Bay Company. As a matter of fact, he was in Washington for this purpose in 1853.[1] Again, they recalled that years before they had heard of negotiations between the United States and England relative to Canada in which the United States for concessions to Canada received additional privileges in the cod-fisheries. This was true in the Canadian reciprocity treaty of 1854.[2] These vaguely recollected incidents thrown back ten years in time formed the nucleus for Spalding's fictitious accounts of the negotiations of 1843, and made them seem to Gray and Eells in conformity with their own recollections.[3]
That Whitman's visit east dispelled ignorance about Ore-
- ↑ Sir George Simpson was in Washington in Oct., 1853, to promote the settlement of the Hudson's Bay Company's claims against the United States arising from their property and possessory rights. Hudson's Bay and Puget's Sound Agricultural Companies, Evidence of Hudson's Bay Co., I, 447. It will be remembered that it was the final arrangement to settle these claims that was one of the occasions that gave rise to the original publication of the Whitman story, see p. 26.
- ↑ See Treaties and Conventions of the United States; Rhodes' Hist, of the United States, II, 8.
- ↑ Possibly Gray's error, in his article in the Astoria Marine Gazette of August 6, 1866, and in his deposition, of asserting that Whitman had interviews with Webster and Fillmore may add plausibility to this explanation. If Gray's memory moved Fillmore's presidency back ten years it is not strange that Spalding's memory should not save him from moving back Sir George Simpson's visit and the fisheries negotiation ten or eleven years.
