At the time of the Whitman massacre Spalding had undergone a terrible nervous and physical strain from which apparently he never recovered.[1]
He believed the massacre had been instigated by the Catholic missionaries, and this belief made him almost if not quite a monomaniac on the subject of Catholicism. He charged the Catholic missionaries repeatedly with having instigated the massacre. These charges were echoed by others, and in their morbid imaginations, behind the scenes, as the concealed prime movers of the tragedy, stood the Hudson's Bay Company, vindictive at the loss of Oregon through the activity of the missionaries. A fierce controversy arose whose embers are still smouldering.[2] The Vicar-General of Walla Walla, the Reverend J. B. A. Brouillet, prepared a reply to these charges which was published in New York in 1853,[3] and later in 1858 was included by J. Ross Browne, a special agent of the Treasury Department, in a report which
- ↑ "A poor broken-down wreck, caused by the frightful ending of his fellow associates, and of his own missionary labors." Gray's Oregon, 482. "His nervous system remained a wreck ever afterward." Mrs. F. F. Victor, River of the West, Hartford, 1870, 409. "There can be no doubt that Spalding's mind was injured by this shock. All his subsequent writings show a want of balance which inclines me to regard with lenity certain erroneous statements in his publications. I find in the Oregon Statesman of August 11, 1855, this line: 'H. H. Spalding a lunatic upon the subject of Catholicism and not over and above sane upon any subject.'" H. H. Bancroft, Oregon, I, 665, note. On the other hand, Mr. A. Hinman who knew Spalding before and after 1847, in a private letter dated Mar. 5th, 1901, says: "The statement made by Professor Bourne that the strain occasioned by the massacre unbalanced Mr. Spalding's mind is without the semblance of any foundation whatever. He was the same Spalding after the massacre as he was before, truthful and reliable." Of Spalding's trustworthiness the reader will have an opportunity to judge a little later.
- ↑ A sketch of this controversy written with a strong Protestant bias and in places with obvious lack of candor will be found in J. G. Craighead's The Story of Marcus Whitman, Philadelphia, 1895, 86-101. Gray's Oregon fairly vibrates with the passion of it. The accounts of the massacre written at the time by the missionaries, may be read in Mowry's Marcus Whitman, and the Early Days of Oregon.
- ↑ Protestantism in Oregon: Account of the Murder of Dr. Whitman and the Ungrateful Calumnies of H. H. Spalding, Protestant Missionary, by the Rev. J. B. A. Brouillet, N. Y., 1853. Brouillet had saved Spalding's life.
