At the moment when Gilliam was ready to move toward the Dalles with an advanced company of fifty men, Ogden arrived from Walla Walla with the survivors of the massacre. The letter announcing to the governor the happy result of his expedition was dated at Vancouver the 8th of January, and was as follows:
"Sir: Mr Ogden has this moment arrived with three boats from Walla Walla, and I rejoice to say he has brought down all the women and children from Waiilatpu, Mr and Mrs Spalding, and Mr Stanley, the artist. Messrs Walker and Eells were safe and well; they were not considered to be in danger. The reports of the later murders committed at Waiilatpu are all absolutely without foundation, not a life having been lost there since the day of Dr Whitman's death. Mr Ogden will visit the Falls on Monday and give you every information in his power respecting the Indians in the interior. The Cayuses, Walla Wallas, Nez Percés, and Yakimas are said to have entered into an alliance for mutual defence.
"In haste, yours respectfully,
"James Douglas."
In Douglas' letter, written in the excitement and haste of the reception of the unhappy company of the rescued, there was an error concerning the fact of three murders which occurred after the 29th,[1] and under no circumstances was an error of a Hudson's Bay officer or a Catholic priest allowed to be anything but intentional by the Protestant American writers who have dealt with the subject of the Waiilatpu massacre; the infallibility imputed to them extending only to their knowledge of the truth, but not to their disposition to tell it. The error in this case was really immaterial, while the on dit of the last sentence of Douglas' letter was of the greatest consequence.
The courier bearing the despatch to Governor Abernethy arrived at Oregon City on Sunday morn-
- ↑ See Brouillet's Authentic Account, 57; Deposition of Elam Young, in Gray's Hist. Or., 482.
