of Dr. Whitman's plan to secure additional missionaries and some lay helpers, with a readjustment of the Walla Walla dinner story. Its author was Perrin B. Whitman, who as a lad of thirteen returned with Dr. Whitman in 1843. Thirty-nine years later he wrote Myron Eells: "I came across to Oregon with my uncle, Dr. Marcus Whitman, in 1843. I heard him say repeatedly, on the journey and after we reached his mission, Waiilatpu, that he went to the States in the winter of 1842 and 1843 for the sole purpose of bringing an immigration with wagons across the plains to Oregon. He was called down to old Fort Walla Walla (now Wallula), then a Hudson's Bay Company's trading post, on a sick call, about the last days of September, 1842. While there, and dining with the trader in charge of the fort, Archibald McKinley, Esq., the Hudson's Bay Company's express from the north, came in and reported that sixty families from British possessions would be at Walla Walla as early the next summer as they possibly could arrrive, to settle probably in the Yakima valley. There was a general outburst of rejoicing over the news by the Jesuit priests, oblates, fort employees, etc., who were at that time there all shouting, 'the country is ours; the Ashburton treaty has, of course, been signed.' The doctor, pushing his chair back from the table, and excusing himself, said he would go home (to Waiilatpu) that afternoon (twenty-five miles), and start immediately to the States overland. He then and there told trader McKinley and his guests, that during the next summer he would bring overland ten American immigrants for every one that would come from Canada. He returned that afternoon, as he said he would, and with but little preparation, except to have good horses, started on the perilous journey the third day of October, 1842, with Hon. A. L. Lovejoy as travelling companion."[1]
In this statement it may be noted that the Hudson's Bay Company colony is one which was to arrive in 1843,[2] and
- ↑ Myron Eells, Marcus Whitman, 12–13.
- ↑ To judge from Spalding's faux pas, it would be safer on the whole to base
