A few months later a strikingly similar narrative was published by W. H. Gray, another former member of the Oregon Mission, in the Astoria Marine Gazette in July and August, 1866. Both narratives are here reproduced.
The Spalding Narrative.
"In 1841 no missionaries crossed, but several emigrant families, bringing wagons, which, on reaching Fort Hall, suffered the same fate with those of 1840. In 1842 considerable emigration moved forward with ox teams and wagons, but on reaching Fort Hall the same story was told them, and the teams were sacrificed, and the emigrant families reached Dr. Whitman's station late in the fall, in very destitute circumstances. About this time, as events proved, that shrewd English diplomatist, Governor Simpson, long a resident on the Northwest coast, reached Washington, after having arranged that an English colony of some 150 souls should leave the Selkirk Settlement on the Eed Kiver of the lakes in the spring of 1842, and cross the Eocky Mountains by the Saskatchewan Pass."
"DR. WHITMAN'S WINTER JOURNEY, 1843."
"The peculiar event that aroused Dr. Whitman and sent him through the mountains of New Mexico, during that terrible winter of 1843, to Washington, just in time to save this now so valuable country from being traded off by Webster to the shrewd Englishman for a 'cod fishery' down east, was as follows: In October of 1842 our mission was called together, on business, at
The Gray Narrative.[1]
"In September, 1842, Dr. Whitman was called to visit a patient at old Fort Wallawalla. While there, a number of boats of the
- ↑ From Gray's History, 288-289. As Gray put his History together from his
original text in The Pacific. As printed above, the first section is the closing paragraph of the ninth of a series of eleven articles on the Oregon Indian Missions and appeared Sept. 28, 1865; the next two sections are from the tenth and eleventh articles, which appeared on October 19 and November 9 respectively. The last article is reprinted in Gray's History of Oregon, 289-291, but without giving the year of its original publication.
