about to exchange this country for the Newfoundland banks fisheries, or a share in them."[1]
If the reader will compare Dr. Geiger's conception of the political crisis with Spalding's (pp. 14, 101), he will see that they are the same. If he searches further he will find that Mr. Spalding was the first man who ever put it on record that the United States were going to exchange Oregon for the cod fisheries. As Perrin B. Whitman readjusted the Spalding and Gray story by making Dr. Whitman hear of a prospective immigration rather than of one just arriving, so Dr. Geiger readjusts the same story by having Whitman informed by Lovejoy of what Spalding said he learned after he reached Washington. The original story and the two readjustments are equally at variance with authenticated history.
There was in 1842 no political crisis in the fate of Oregon for Whitman to discover in Oregon, nor was there one in Washington for him to be informed of that could suggest the necessity of a journey. Under critical examination all urgent political reasons for Whitman's journey to the United States disappear. On the other hand, the unexpected arrival of the large immigration of 1842 of one hundred and twenty-five persons, the news of the policy of the Government as brought by Dr. White, and the probability of a greatly increased immigration in the immediate future emphasized the mission crisis and demonstrated to Whitman's mind the fatal shortsightedness of the American Board in discontinuing the Waiilatpu mission at a time when its services would be more than ever needed to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of the whites and Indians in Oregon.[2]
- ↑ It is perhaps superfluous to remark that no contemporary evidence has ever been found that the rumor attributed to Lovejoy was ever current in 1842. His two letters about Whitman's ride give no clue. The account of the immigration of 1842 in White's Ten Years in Oregon, and in Medorem Crawford's Journal reveal no anxiety that the United States would give up any part of Oregon, nor do such representative newspapers as Niles's Register or the N. Y. Tribune, in discussing Lord Ashburton's mission, intimate that the Oregon boundary was likely to be taken up. See the issues of Jan. 29, 1842. Lord Ashburton arrived April 3, and the next notice in Niles's Register is Aug. 6. The Oregon immigration of 1842 left Independence, Mo., May 16.
- ↑ See infra, pp. 90 and 106–109.
