The fall of 1842 brought a still larger immigration, numbering more than one hundred and including many families. It was an immigration well suited to impress the Indians as it passed through their lands, and further to arouse their apprehensions for the future.
With the arrival of this immigration affairs at the Walla Walla mission seem to have reached a crisis. There had been for some time a growing feeling at the headquarters of the board of missions at Boston that the results of the mission at Walla Walla were not satisfactory. Missionaries at that day were expected by the board that commissioned them to confine themselves strictly to the religious instruction and care of those to whom they were sent. Even education had not yet come to be regarded as a proper part of their work, while instruction in industry and secular arts must have appeared quite aside from it. Besides, news had reached the board of unpleasant differences among the missionaries themselves which seemed to bode ill for the work of the mission. Whitman now learned that the order for the abandonment of the Walla Walla mission, if not already issued, was at least imminent. A less farsighted and courageous man than he might have welcomed the order to leave the post where hardships were great and where perils from the natives were thickening around him. But it was not of Whitman's character to abandon a post which, perilous as it was, he felt was important to the cause of missions and to the interests of his country to hold. He would not abandon it without first making a determined effort to secure from the mission board its continuance and reinforcement, and from the government at Washington provisions and the adoption of measures that would bring content to the Indians and open an easier and safer highway for intending immigrants.
Accordingly, on the 2d of October, 1842, within a month after the arrival at Walla Walla of the immigration of that year, Whitman was on his way to Washington and Boston, accompanied by a single companion. Crossing the mountains at any season of the year in those days was a serious undertaking; entered upon at the edge of winter it was perilous, and for any object but one of supreme importance and urgency foolhardy. Undertaken as it was with Whitman's full knowledge of its difficulties and perils and with his conception of the interests at stake, it was heroic.
Whitman's one companion on this perilous ride was A. L. Lovejoy, a young lawyer who had arrived in Oregon with the immigration of that year, himself destined to an important part in the early history of Oregon. They reached Fort Hall without serious difficulty, but here they found their way over the direct route barred by the snows of an early winter. Not discouraged by this, Whitman procured a guide, and he and his companion turned southward, keeping along the western base of the Rocky mountains to the Santa Fe trail, and thence eastward to St. Louis, where Whitman, having left Lovejoy on the way to return by way of Fort Hall to Oregon, arrived in February after a journey of four months of incredible hardships and privation and peril. From St. Louis he hastened on to Washington, stopping briefly in Cincinnati on the way. From Washington he went to Boston by way of New York. The date of his visit to Washington is not fixed, but it is certain that he was in New York, March 28, and a day or two later was on the steamer on the sound bound for Boston, and that he was in Boston the first week in April. His stay at his home after leaving Boston must have been brief, for he was back in St. Louis early in May on his return to Oregon, in less than three months from the time of his arrival there on his eastward journey.
Finding the emigration somewhat delayed in setting out, he visited relatives in Quincy, Illinois, then went to the Shawnee mission in the neighborhood of the rendezvous from which emigrants for Oregon were accustomed to start. On May 17, he was visited here by a committee of emigrants appointed for that purpose, and on the 20th attended a meeting of the committee appointed to draw up the rules and regulations for the journey.
