the order he denied that a meeting of the mission was held in September, 1842, which authorized Whitman's journey.[1] He thus deliberately denied something that he must have known perfectly well if he remembered anything at all about the transaction, and professed ignorance of another fact of which he could not have been ignorant.
Again he solemnly vouched for his account of the Walla Walla dinner as based on his own knowledge, and for the story of Governor Simpson's negotiations in Washington and Whitman's success in frustrating them as derived from Whitman himself.[2] Gray shared Spalding's intense prejudices and vindictiveness toward the Hudson's Bay Company and the Catholic missionaries, and consequently his History of Oregon is very untrustworthy as a source of Oregon history.[3]
When it was brought out during the Whitman controversy in 1881–5 that the Hudson's Bay Company's Colony from the Red River arrived in 1841, and therefore could not have afforded the occasion for the dramatic scene at Walla Walla and for Whitman's resolution to go east in September, 1842, Spalding's "inaccuracy in his recollection of details" was acknowledged, but the rejection of the great facts of the history on account of "the infirmity of memory of Mr. Spalding"[4] was deprecated, and two new explanations of Whitman's journey were immediately forthcoming, which have been accepted by writers who could not, like Barrows and Nixon, repeat the Walla Walla dinner story after it had been exploded.
One of these is a deft combination of a gross exaggeration
- ↑ Circular 8, 5–6.
- ↑ History of Oregon, 288; supra, p. 32; and Eells, Marcus Whitman, 8.
- ↑ "It would require a book as large as Gray's to correct Gray's mistakes." Bancroft's History of the Northwest Coast, II, 536. "It has, however, three faults—lack of arrangement, acrimonious partisanship, and disregard for truth." Bancroft, History of Oregon, I, 302. "His book, in my best judgment, is a bitter, prejudiced, sectarian, controversial work in the form of a history." Peter H. Burnett, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer, N. Y., 1880, 222. These last two judgments I regard as absolutely just.
It will not escape notice that Gray, like Spalding, suppressed all reference to the missionary troubles in 1842 and to the action of the Board. - ↑ Dr. Laurie in The Missionary Herald, Feb. 1885, 56–57.
