Atkinson's labors as a home missionary took him at one time or another all over Oregon and Washington and brought him repeatedly into contact with the pioneers and the early missionaries, and had the story then been known to any of the people who in the last fifteen or twenty years have alleged that it was familiar to them long before 1865,[1] Dr. Atkinson could hardly have escaped knowledge of it during these years of home missionary travel.
Other examples of this universal silence prior to 1865 may be given. Joel Palmer, an Oregon pioneer of 1845, recorded in his journal under date of Sept. 17, 1845, that Dr. Whitman and his wife came to his camp with provisions. The following is his account of the visit.
"The doctor and lady remained with us during the day; he took occasion to inform us of the many incidents that marked his ten years' sojourn in this wilderness region, of a highly interesting character. Among other things he related that during his residence in this country, he had been reduced to such necessity for want of food as to be compelled to slay his horse f stating that within that period, no less than thirty-two horses had been served up at his table."[2]
This comprises all of Whitman's life that Palmer mentions in his diary, and as he had other interviews with Whitman and with Spalding, before his book was published two years later, this silence is significant. Spalding himself, the author of the legend, three years after "Whitman's Ride," was evidently unaware that Oregon had been "saved" to the United States, for he prophesied in a letter to Joel Palmer, April 7, 1846, that Oregon would become an independent republic. " Others," he writes, "following in their track [i. e., of an "industrious," "virtuous," "Sabbath-loving "people], learning of
- ↑ For these testimonies, see the art. of Mr. Eells, in The Whitman College Quarterly, Mar. 1898, or the quotation from it in Prof. H. W. Parker's art. in The Homiletic Review, July, 1901.
- ↑ Joel Palmer: Journal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains to the Mouth of the Columbia River, etc., Cincinnati, 1847, 57.
