Following Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin, another successful writer of boys' books, Hezekiah Butterworth, gave the legend prominence in his tale, The Log School-House by the Columbia,[1] and made it the subject of a poem from which a selection may be quoted as a curiosity:
"That Spring, a man with frozen feet
Came to the marble halls of state,
And told his mission but to meet
The chill of scorn, the scoff of hate.
'Is Oregon worth saving?' asked
The treaty-makers from the coast;
And him the Church with questions asked,
And said, 'Why did you leave your post?
"Was it for this that he had braved
The warring storms of mount and sky?
Yes!—yet that Empire he had saved,
And to his post went back to die—
Went back to die from Washington,—
Went back to die for Walla Walla
For Idaho and Oregon."
In this review of the literature of the Legend of Marcus Whitman we now pass to the jesiv 1895, the date of the publication of the first professed biographies. In that year the Rev. J. G. Craighead, for many years one of the editors of the New York Evangelist, who had been familiar with the story since 1870 and had in vain devoted weeks to the effort to authenticate the part of it describing Whitman's work in Washington,[2] published his Story of Marcus Whitman: Early
- ↑ N. Y,, 1893. The hero is aroused by Whitman's appearance in the east, p. 28. The legend is given in brief, pp. 235-38; the poem, pp. 244 ff. On p. 103 the author remarks: "Exact history has robbed this story of some of its romance, but it is still one of the noblest wonder-tales of our own or any nation." In 1890 the story finds a place in another widely used text-book, Montgomery's Leading Facts of American History, 725-58; ed. of 1900, 263-64.
- ↑ See infra, p. 81, n. 1.
Walker, D. D., 377-78, N. Y., 1894, and Congregationalism in America, by A. E. Dunning, D. D., N. Y., 1894, in Ch. XXI, contributed by Dr. Joseph E. Roy, 442.
