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something that he did not know. In other words, in the positions and statements he appears to me to make, he wants to show that a brother lawyer does not know anything about what he knows, in, of, or about the matter Mr. Ross has been writing about; and the honorable Mr. Evans gives honorable Mr. Ross a lecture because he does not know as much as Mr. Evans claims to know of Oregon history. Passing down his first column, in which he makes liberal use of Mrs. Victor's rubbish, he adds Rev. Dr. Atkinson to "Spalding and Gray's fable." This is quite interesting to Gray to know that he is placed, in the over-wise estimation of two such learned historians as the honorable Mrs. F. F. Victor and the honorable Mr. Elwood Evans, as being competent to invent a "fable" that the two, the honorable lady and the honorable lawyer, should call a fable. Now, since railroads have crossed the Rocky Mountains, learned people have caught a spark of electricity,and added to it the wisdom of the moon, by which, they intend to dispense with the light of the sun. The people that lived in the days when Oregon was young, only imagined they were some where else, perhaps in London or Philadelphia, and they knew all about everybody else, and especially such as acted and lived in young Oregon.
Our historical rats of Oregon know the art of gathering a big pile of rubbish, and when found and examined, there is nothing useful, ornamental, nor clean, about or in it. Allow a young, ignorant, romantic, or any other musty name the honorable writers choose to apply, to say:
First— W. H. Gray did not go to the Wallamet (as Frost and Lee write it) until about September i, 1842. He returned to the Whitman station for his family on the 21st of September, 1842. He was not ready to leave the Whitman station till about the 15th of October. I do not like to call Hon. Mr. Evan's statement false, but I will admit he is mistaken in date, by not having read Gray's circular controversy with Mrs. Victor. In May, 1842, Gray was not in the Willamette valley, and it is certain that he was at the Whitman station in June of that year, and a member of that mission, and at that meeting was honorably permitted to leave its service and go where he pleased with his family. Does the Hon. Elwood Evans call his statement the truth? Gray was also at the station at the time of the called meeting after his return from the Willamette valley. The starting of Dr. Whitman at the time he did, to go to the States, caused a delay in his (Gray's) arrangements to go to the
