of his death, it would seem, ought to have shielded him from this class, but it did not. In justice to his contemporaries, however, it is due to say, every one of them, of all denominations except one, was his friend and defender.
That one man was a French Jesuit priest, by the name of J. B. A. Brouillett. He was Acting Bishop among the Indians, of a tribe near to the Cayuse, where Dr. Whitman had labored for eleven years, and where he perished in 1847. After the massacre, there were some grave charges made against Brouillett, and in 1853 he wrote a pamphlet, entitled, "Protestantism in Oregon," in which he made a vicious attack upon the dead Whitman, and the living Dr. Spalding, and the other Protestant Missionaries of the American Board.
It naturally called out some very pointed rejoinders, yet attracted but little attention from the Christian world. Patriotic American Catholics took but little stock in the clamor of the French priest, and the matter was in a fair way 235 to be forgotten, when interest was suddenly renewed in the subject by the appearance of an executive document, No. 38, 35th Congress, 1st Session, signed J. Ross Browne, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and dated at San Francisco, December 4, 1867, which contained a few sentences from J. Ross Browne and all of the Brouillett pamphlet.
