Page:The Whitman Controversy.pdf/38

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lenge the living to this controversy. Please look at her quotation under her question No. 28. She asks: "But why did not he (Dr. Whitman) go to Washington and come back with a party of immigrants and a commission, as well as Dr. White?" She evidently meant that her readers should understand that he neither went to Washington nor came back with the company of immigrants—a double falsehood, we have the right to infer, or affirm—as we know he did go to Washington, and did come back with the immigration of 1843.

Under No. 30, she says, referring to letters that related to secret service funds, and a scheme to get settlers into the Oregon country, as well as sheep for Indians: "We admit that to be Dr. Whitman's sole or main object in going to Washington." He was disappointed in not having sheep to give the Indians. We know the treaty of Oregon was signed June 15, 1846. But a short time (eleven and a half months) before, the lives of himself, his wife, and several other Americans with him, were sacrificed as a last spiteful effort to appease the Hudson's Bay Company and the Jesuits. They had been defeated by the influence of this one man.

At this place we give the views of Hon. Elwood Evans in hig annual address before the Pioneer Association, 1877. He says: "The massacre at Waiilatpu on the 29th of November, 1847, was a cold-blooded and perfidious murder without the slightest justifying cause." He further says:

"To depict the internal condition of the country at that time, and exhibit the relations each to the others of such diverse elements of population, I have, upon previous occasions, compared the country itself to a tinder-box. The two white, quasi-hostile races may represent the Hint and the steel, the native race the tinder. As long as no collision between the whites occurred, the Indians might continue quiet; but any excitement indicating hostility between British and Americans, the tinder was in danger of ignition. * * * * It is equally true that there existed an educated bias which had already made the Indian the dependant of the foreign element; there was also an educated prejudice which fostered hostility to the American settler. * * * * He had readily and too aptly learned that King Georges—as he called the British—had no real desire for the Bostons in the country.