The strongest champion of the story at this crisis was the Rev. Myron Eells, a son of Cushing Eells. In 1882 he published his History of Indian Missions on the Pacific Coast.[1] In the first part of this work he tells the true history of Whitman's journey as derived from the contemporary evidence in the Missionary Herald[2] and in the second part the fictitious account as derived from Spalding, Gray, Geiger, and Cushing Eells.[3] To the untrained reader the second narrative would seem equally as well authenticated as the first.
Mr. Eells' next contribution was a pamphlet entitled Marcus Whitman, M. D. Proofs of his work in saving Oregon to the United States, and in promoting the Immigration of 1843.[4] In this is reproduced all the first-hand testimony that the most strenuous exertions had been able to gather at that stage of the controversy. All that is presented in addition to the assertions of Spalding and Gray and the earlier statement of Cushing Eells is made up of the recollections in 1883 of William Geiger, Cushing Eells, Mrs. E. Walker, Perrin B. Whitman, Alanson Hinman, and S. J. Parker, M. D., of conversations with Whitman forty years earlier. There is no dated evidence that any one of these men revealed the tenor of these conversations before the publication by Spalding and Gray in 1865-66 of their recollections of substantially identical conversations. The testimony of these men will be examined in connection with that of Spalding and Gray. Nowhere in Mr. Eells' pamphlet is the contemporary first-hand testimony, printed in the Missionary Herald in 1843, reproduced.
The critical examination of the case by Elwood Evans and Mrs. Victor, if one may judge from the citations of their newspaper letters by their opponents, was searching and ought to have convinced unbiassed minds. Their conclusions are
