Page:The Whitman Controversy.pdf/23

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where all emigrant wagons had stopped. This was the easy part of the route at that place. Captain Grant attempted to prevent all wagons from coming to Oregon in 1843. Dr. Whitman assured the immigrants that they could bring their wagons to the Columbia, and Dr. Whitman won. After leaving Fort Hall, through the difficult and unknown part, Dr. Whitman was with the first immigrant wagon, the pilot to Grand Ronde, from which place he engaged some of those Indians whom he had "never conciliated "to find the route over the Blue Mountains. Thus he did pilot the immigration over the most difficult part of the route. Says Hon. Jesse Applegate, in his "Day with the Cow Column of 1843": "To no other individual are the emigrants of 1843 so much indebted for the successful conclusion of their journey as to Dr. Marcus Whitman."

Fourteenth—"According to Mr. Applegate," says Mrs. Victor, "Mr. Remeau, of the Hudson's Bay Company, furnished a complete way-bill of the route, with camping places." But Mr. Applegate was in the "cow column," or latter part of the immigration, and what good did this way-bill do when Dr. Whitman's ad vice in reference to taking wagons to the Columbia had prevailed over Captain Grant's doubts; when the wagons of the first part had gone, and when, according to Mrs. Victor, even they had to leave Mr. Remeau's route at the most difficult places, as it was the pack train? This seems to imply that the Hudson's Bay Company helped the immigration from Fort Hall. Hon. J. W. Nesmith (Pioneer Address, 1875), Governor P. H. Burnett ("Recollections of an Old Pioneer," page 117), and Mr. J. G. Baker, in a letter to the writer, all of that year's immigration, say that Captain Grant did all that he could do to induce them to leave their wagons at Fort Hall, or else to go to California. Gov. Burnett calls Fort Hall "the most critical part of the journey," and Mr. Nesmith says, "Happily Whitman's advice prevailed over Captain Grant's." According to Palmer's history, the same game was tried at Fort Hall with the immigration of 1845.

Fifteenth—Mrs. Victor gives a synopsis of Governor Simpson's journey around the world, the date of his starting, and also of his being at Vancouver, November 30, 1841, and adds: "It will be seen from these dates how impossible it was that the head of the great fur company should have been where he was said to have been, or doing what he was said to have been doing. I once wrote to George P. Roberts, the factotem of the business of the company