he prepared for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on the Indian War in Oregon and Washington Territories.[1]
Brouillet's reply was temperate in tone and in marked contrast to the tremulous passion of Spalding's articles, but he made assertions about the attitude of the Indians toward the Protestant missionaries, about the inefficacy of their work, and the worldly interests which influenced them which Spalding and his missionary colleagues regarded as slanders. But to have this Catholic disparagement of their labors distributed as a public document, of which he became aware as has been said at about the same time[2] when the claim to the Lapwai Mission station fell through, and the Hudson's Bay Company's claims were recognized, incensed Spalding beyond endurance and roused him to ceaseless efforts to overwhelm the Catholics with obloquy and to demonstrate the injustice of the forfeiture of the title to the Lapwai Mission Station. He began writing and lecturing[3] on what the missionaries had done for Oregon, upon the work of Whitman, and the massacre. He secured a large number of affidavits repelling as false Brouillet's charges and induced many religious bodies to adopt resolutions drafted by himself setting forth his version of Whitman's achievements and the radical injustice of the treatment accorded to himself in the affair of the Lapwai station. These labors occupied five years, and in 1870 he came east, where through the influence of William E. Dodge, the
- ↑ Executive Doc. (House of Rep.), 35th Cong., 1st Sess., No. 38. Spalding's charges are quoted on pages 49-51.
- ↑ The exact date is uncertain. Spalding said it was "long after its publication." Exec. Doc. 37, 5.
- ↑ Bancroft says, I, 657, note: "In 1866-67 Spalding revived the memories of twenty years before, and delivered a course of lectures on the subject of the Waiilatpu mission, which were published in the Albany (Or.) States Rights Democrat, extending over a period from November 1866 to February 1867." But the lectures apparently began at least one year earlier, for in one of them printed in the Early Labors, he says it is eighteen years since the massacre, which occurred in November, 1847. Exec. Doc. 37, 26.
The articles in The Pacific, it will be remembered, appeared in 1865. The Rev. Myron Eells informs me that Spalding's articles extended over a year. He has one, No. 37, which appeared in January, 1868.
