external and internal evidence. In the first place, although Mr. Spalding's statements have been reaffirmed or disputed for twenty years or more by many people in the northwest professing to speak of their own knowledge, during all this time no evidence of a date earlier than 1864 has been brought forward to show that anybody east or west had ever heard of it prior to that date. Second, upon its original appearance, in part, in 1864, it was related on Mr. Spalding's authority;[1] and as late as 1894 the Rev. Myron Eells, the son of Cushing Eells, and for many years an indefatigable champion of the Whitman story, in his life of his father, wrote: "Rev. H. H. Spalding was about the first person to make known the fact of Dr. "Whitman's going East on a political errand. Dr. G. H. Atkinson learned of it, and believed that this work ought to be set to the credit of missions. He said so publicly. In his journey East in 1865 he told the secretaries of the American Board that while they had been accustomed to look upon their Oregon mission as a failure it was a grand success. They were very skeptical and thought that many extravagant assertions had been made about Whitman's achievement. Dr. Atkinson replied: 'Write to Dr. Eells, as you know him to be careful in his statements and are accustomed to rely on what he says.'"[2]
That the story was new in 1864-5 has been so positively denied that it will be necessary to present the evidence of this fact in some detail. This will be done by reviewing in a series certain critical junctures at which if the story had been known it could hardly have failed to receive mention.
As Dr. Atkinson was the man who first brought this story to the attention of the American Board and was most
- ↑ See p. 102.
- ↑ Father Eells, or the Result of Fifty-Jive Years of Missionary Labors in Washington and Oregon; A Biography of Gushing Eells, D. D., Boston, 1894, 106.
with which "Whitman was killed. It is, although a little earlier in date, not to be treated as a part of the original source of the story, for it is second-hand from Spalding. For the text of this account see Note B. p. 101.
