to the narrative embodied in this resolution is the assertion that Whitman took his wagon through to the Columbia in 1836. This was not true and could not have been truthfully asserted by Whitman either to President Tyler or in the supposititious pamphlet. Mrs. Whitman says in her diary of that journey under date of Aug. 22: "As for the wagon, it is left at the Fort"[1] [Boisé]. If the Zachrey letter is accepted in its entirety Whitman is proved to have falsified. If it was interpolated by Spalding, as I think is clear, how much of it did Zachrey write? No copy of any pamphlet, nor any newspaper article by Whitman published for the purpose indicated has ever been found. Nor would it, humanly speaking, have been possible for Whitman, who reached Westport Feb. 15, and Boston March 30, and was back again in St. Louis May 12, to write a pamphlet which could be circulated in Texas,[2] where Zachrey lived, early enough for his father and his neighbors to sell out and get ready to start from Independence, May 22, for Oregon.[3]
The genuine residuum of the Zachrey letter, less the Spalding interpolations, represents the coalescence after twenty-three years in Zachrey's memory of what Whitman did on the journey for the emigrants with the indistinct recollection of the inducements to start. It is probable that reports of some of Dr. White's speeches to promote emigration in 1842[4] reached the elder Zachrey, and the boy later attributed the efforts of White to Whitman. The other testimonies advanced to prove that Whitman was an active promoter of the emigration of 1843 likewise dissolve into thin air when subjected to criticism. In 1883 Myron Eells printed personal statements from fourteen survivors of the emigration
- ↑ Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Assoc., 1891, 52. The cart, the wagon was changed to a cart two days before they arrived at Fort Hall (ibid., 47), was still at Fort Boisé in 1839. See Farnham's Travels, 77.
- ↑ It will be remembered that the settled part of Texas, then a foreign State, was hundreds of miles from Independence.
- ↑ This date is given by Burnett, Recollections, 99. Burnett kept a diary of the journey.
- ↑ Cf. White's Ten Years in Oregon, 142–143.
