persistent in giving it publicity the date at which he learned it is of vital importance in determining the date at which it first became known. Since he was apparently unremitting in his efforts to diffuse the story as soon as it came to his knowledge and since he had probably the best facilities of anybody connected with missions in Oregon for hearing the story as soon as it began to circulate, the presumption, in the absence of any contemporary dated evidence to the contrary, is very strong that the story was new in 1864-5. Dr. Atkinson arrived in Oregon in June 1848, a little over six months after the Whitman massacre, as the first missionary of the American Home Missionary Society.[1] On June 13 he had a conference with W. H. Gray as to where he had better establish his station. June 21 he arrived in Oregon City, where he had an extended conference with Mr. Spalding. In Oregon City at this time were Cushing Eells to whom Dr. Atkinson referred the secretaries of the American Board in 1865 for confirmation of Spalding's narrative, and A. Lawrence Lovejoy who accompanied Whitman across the mountains in 1842 and to whom Dr. Atkinson appealed for evidence in 1876. Yet neither from Spalding nor Eells nor Lovejoy did the young home missionary hear a word in 1848 of the saving of Oregon by Marcus Whitman.[2]
If the story had been known then or thought of by any one of these men, could they have helped telling it to Dr. Atkinson and could he, the enthusiastic young missionary, have helped recording it? During the next fifteen years Dr.
- ↑ Before the Oregon treaty, 1846, Oregon was technically foreign territory and the missionaries there were under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
- ↑ See Doctor Atkinson's Journal for June 13, and June 21st, 1848, and Mrs. Atkinson's Narrative, in Biography of Rev. G. H. Atkinson, D. D., etc., compiled by Nancy Bates Atkinson, Portland, Or., 1893, 116-120-121, and 109.
Mr. Spalding wrote an account of the massacre to the American Board, and another to Mrs. Whitman's parents. There is nothing in either about Whitman's political services, see The Missionary Herald, July 1848, 338-341; and the Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1893, 93-103.
2
