"You will be surprised to see that we are not yet started. Lieutenant Fremont left this morning. The emigrants have some of them just gone, and others have been gone a week, and some are yet coming on. I shall start to-morrow. I regret I could not have spent some of the time spent here in suspense with my friends at the East.
"I have only a lad of thirteen, my nephew, with me. I take him to have some one to stay with Mrs. Whitman. I cannot give you much of an account of the emigrants until we get on the road. It is said that there are over two hundred men besides women and children. They look like a fair representative of a country population. Few, I conclude, are pious. Fremont intends to return by land, so as to be back early in winter. Should he succeed in doing so we may be able to send you an account of the Mission and country at that time. We do not ask you to become the patrons of emigration to Oregon, but we desire you to use your influence that, in connection with all the influx into the country, there may be a fair proportion of good men of our own denomination who shall avail themselves of the advantages of the country in common with others. Also that ministers should come out as citizens or under the Home Missionary Society. We think agents of the Board and of the Home Missionary Society, as also ministers and good men in general, may do much to send a share of good, pious people to that country. We cannot feel it to be at all just that we do nothing, while worldly men and Papists are doing so much.... I wish to say a few words about manufactures in Oregon, that I may remove an impression that they cannot compete with the English. First, let us take the operatives and the raw material from the Pacific Islands. It matters not at how much labor the Islander cleans the cotton, for it gives him employment, and for that he gets goods, and then for his coffee and sugar and salt and cotton, etc., etc., he gets goods also. This is all an exchange trade that only a population and manufacturers in Oregon can take advantage of, because they alone will want the articles of exchange which the Islander can give. The same will hold good in relation to Indians whenever they shall have sheep, and I intend to try and have the Government give them sheep instead of money, a result not likely to be delayed long. A good man or company can now select the best mill sites and spots, and likely would find a sawmill profitable at once. I think our greatest hope for having Oregon at least part Protestant now lies in encouraging a proper intention of good men to go there while the country is open. I want to call your attention to the operation of Farnham of Salem and the Bensons of New York in Oregon. I am told credibly that secretly Government aids them with the secret service fund. Captain Howard of Maine is also in expectation of being employed by Government to take out emigrants by ship should the Oregon Bill pass."
Those who love the memory of this brave missionary must hold this letter exceedingly precious; it has, in addition to its enthusiasm and patriotism, that sane and practical outlook on the future that pervades so much of Washington's writings, especially the letters to William Crawford. Here is another man looking, on the Pacific slope, for such important commonplace things as mill sites in 1843, just as Washington was looking for mill sites in the Ohio Valley in 1770, and between the two it would be difficult to say which was the more seriously optimistic, though the influence of both must have been strong, in their respective days, on the advancing pioneer.
For all the daring of the hardy Winter's journey that Whitman made [11] we look upon this other journey, with this splendid army of nearly a thousand Oregon pioneers and home-builders, as the one of supremest importance. Ay, here was Whitman's Ride,—not sung, perhaps, so widely as the one in the Winter's snows, and yet the one ride which Oregon could not have missed, and the one she can never forget! Let the fruitless debate go on as to the exact measure of this unpretentious missionary's influence in shaping Government policies and moulding public opinion; it is enough for me to know that he viewed the whole question as keenly as his few letters prove he unquestionably did, and then to know that when the great emigration started he was there to direct and inspire; that he could do the humblest duty and say the least about it, and at the same time show Fremont where to go if he would gain the immortal title of "Pathfinder."
Whitman has suffered at the hands of his friends, who have been over-jealous touching matters concerning which his own lovable modesty and reticence would not allow him to speak; they have made claims and inferences unwarranted by the known facts of the case. His Winter's ride has been compared with Sheridan's from Winchester, and tasted no better in some mouths than does the ballad of Sheridan's Ride in the mouths of Crook's men, who knew their leader had, an hour back, given and carried out the order Sheridan is said (in the poem) to have given when he dashed upon the scene, when, in fact, he merely came to Crook and asked him what he had done. [12] And yet Reid's poem is as true to the spirit of the indomitable Sheridan as Butterfield's is true of Whitman.
We have compared Whitman on the Walla Walla to Zeisberger on the Muskingum; and the terrible massacre of November 29, 1847, in which the brave hero of Oregon, with his wife and twelve others, gave their lives, belongs in history with the awful Gnadenhütten tragedy. The murder of these brave pioneers by Indians, to whom they had given the best of their lives and all their strength and prayers, is quite as fiendishly incongruous as the destruction of the Moravian band of corn-huskers by frenzied Monongahela frontiersmen; in each case the murderers knew not what they did.
But Whitman's work was done, for we have it in his own hand that he would be contented if posterity would remember, not that he had influenced a President or a Congress or saved an Empire, but merely, as he wrote, that he was
"one of the first to take white women across the mountains and prevent the disaster and reaction which would have occurred by the breaking up of the present emigration, and establishing the first wagon road across to the border of the Columbia." [13]
And yet when you study this boast you will find that it contains in its essence all that any boast for Whitman could hold; for it was an army of axe-bearers that was to save Oregon; and if Meade won Gettysburg or Wolfe captured Quebec, then Whitman and the Americans who went in his track won for America the northern Pacific slope.