Accompanied by a fellow missionary, Whitman penetrated into the Western wilderness as far as the Wind River Mountains, near the present Yellowstone Park. After familiarizing themselves through talks with traders, trappers, and Indians with the conditions which prevailed in the valley of the Columbia, Whitman and his companion returned to Boston, and upon the strength of their report the American Board decided to lose no time in occupying the field. Ordered to establish a station on the Columbia, in the vicinity of Fort Walla Walla, then a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Whitman turned the long and arduous trip across the continent into a wedding journey. The conveyances used and the roundabout route taken by the bridal couple strikingly emphasize the primitive internal communications of the period. They drove in a sleigh from Elmira, N. Y., to Hollidaysburg, a hamlet on the Pennsylvania Canal, at the foot of the Alleghanies, the canal-boats, which were built in sections, being taken over the mountains on a railway. Travelling by the canal and its communicating waterways to the Ohio, they journeyed by steamboat down the Ohio to its junction with the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence up the Missouri to Council Bluffs, where they bought a wagon (bear that wagon in mind, if you please, for you shall hear of it later on), and outfitted for the journey across the plains. Accompanied by another missionary couple, Doctor and Mrs. Spalding, they turned the noses of their mules northwestward and a week or so later caught up with an expedition sent out by the American Fur Company to its settlement of Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia. Following the North Fork of the Platte, they crossed the Wind River Mountains within sight of the landmark which came in time to be known as Frémont’s Peak, though these two young women crossed the Great Divide six years before Frémont, “the pathfinder,” ever set eyes upon it. Few women of our race have ever made so perilous or difficult a journey. Before it was half completed, the party, owing to a miscalculation, ran out of flour and for weeks on end were forced to live on jerked buffalo meat and tea. Crossing the Snake River at a point where it was upward of a mile in width, the wagon was capsized by the velocity of the current, and, the mules, on which the women had been put for safety, becoming entangled in the harness, their riders escaped drowning by what the missionaries devoutly ascribed to a miracle and the rough-spoken frontiersmen to “damned good luck.” Another river they crossed by means of a dried elkskin with two ropes attached, on which they lay flat and perfectly motionless while two Indian women, holding the ropes in their teeth, swam the stream, drawing this unstable ferry behind them.
At Fort Hall, near the present site of Pocatello, Ida., they came upon the southernmost of that chain of trading-posts with which the Hudson’s Bay Company sought to guard the enormous territory which, without so much as a “by-your-leave,” it had taken for its own. Here Captain Grant, the company’s factor, made a determined effort to induce Whitman to abandon the wagon that he had brought with him across the continent in the face of almost insuperable obstacles. But the obstinacy that had caused the folks in Plainfield to shake their heads when the name of young Marcus Whitman was mentioned stood him in good stead, for the more persistent the Englishman became in his objections the more adamantine grew the American in his determination to cling at all costs to his wagon, for no one knew better than Whitman that this had proved the most successful of the methods pursued by the great British fur monopoly to discourage the colonization of the territory wherein it conducted its operations. The officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company well knew that the colonization of the valley of the Columbia by Americans meant not only the end of their enormously profitable monopoly but the end of British domination in that region. Though they did not have it in their power to forcibly prevent Americans from entering the country, they argued that there could be no colonization on a large scale unless the settlers had wagons in which to transport their seeds and farming implements. Hence the company adopted the policy of stationing its agents along the main routes of travel with instructions to stop at nothing short of force to detain the wagons. And until Marcus Whitman came this policy had accomplished the desired result, the specious arguments of Captain Grant having proved so successful, indeed, that the stockade at Fort Hall was filled with abandoned wagons and farming implements which would have been of inestimable value to the settlers who had been persuaded or bullied into leaving them behind. But Whitman was made of different stuff, and the English official might as well have tried to argue the Snake River out of its course as to argue this hard-headed Yankee into giving up his wagon. Though it twice capsized and was all but lost in the swollen streams, though once it fell over a precipice and more than once went rolling down a mountainside, though for miles on end it was held on the narrow, winding mountain trails by means of drag-ropes, and though it became so dilapidated in time that it finished its journey on two wheels instead of four, the ramshackle old vehicle, thanks to Whitman’s bulldog grit and determination, was hauled over the mountains and was the first vehicle to enter the forbidden land. I have laid stress upon this incident of the wagon, because, as things turned out, it proved a vital factor in the winning of Oregon. “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” runs the ancient doggerel; “for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the kingdom was lost.” And, had it not been for this decrepit old wagon of Whitman’s, a quarter of a million square miles of the most fertile land between the oceans would have been lost to the Union.
Seven months after helping his bride into the sleigh at Elmira, Whitman drove his gaunt mule-team into the gate of the stockade at Fort Walla Walla. To-day one can make that same journey in a little more than four days and sit in a green plush chair all the way. The news of Whitman’s coming had preceded him, and an enormous concourse of Indians, arrayed in all their barbaric finery, was assembled to greet the man who had journeyed so many moons to bring them the white man’s Book of Heaven. Picture that quartet of missionaries—skirmishers of the church, pickets of progress, advance-guards of civilization—as they stood on the banks of the Columbia one September morning in 1836 and consulted as to how to begin the work they had been sent to do. It was all new. There were no precedents to guide them. How would you begin, my friends, were you suddenly set down in the middle of a wilderness four thousand miles from home, with instructions to Christianize and civilize the savages who inhabited it?
Whitman, in whom diplomacy lost an adept when he became a missionary, appreciated that the first thing for him to do, if he was to be successful in his mission, was to win the confidence of the ruling powers of Oregon—the Hudson’s Bay Company officials at Fort Vancouver. This necessitated another journey of three hundred miles, but it could be made in canoes with Indian paddlers. Doctor McLoughlin, the stern old Scotchman who was chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and whose word was law throughout a region larger than all the States east of the Mississippi put together, had to be able, from the very nature of his business, to read the characters of men as students read a book; and he was evidently pleased with what he read in the face of the American missionary, for he gave both permission and assistance in establishing a mission station at Waiilatpui, twenty-five miles from Walla Walla.
Whitman’s first move in his campaign for the civilization of the Indians was to induce them to build permanent homes and to plough and sow. This the Hudson’s Bay officials had always discouraged. They did not want their savage allies to be transformed into tillers of the soil; they wanted them to remain nomads and hunters, ready to move hundreds of miles in quest of furs. The only parallel in modern times to the greed, selfishness, and cruelty which characterized the administration of the Hudson’s Bay Company was the rule of the Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola and of King Leopold in the Congo.
At this time Oregon was a sort of no man’s land, to which neither England nor the United States had laid definite claim, though the former, realizing the immensity of its natural resources and the enormous strategic value that would accrue from its possession, had long cast covetous eyes upon it. The Americans of that period, on the contrary, knew little about Oregon and cared less, regarding the proposals for its acquisition with the same distrust with which the Americans of to-day regard any suggestion for extending our boundaries below the Rio Grande. Daniel Webster had said on the floor of the United States Senate: “What do we want with this vast, worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie-dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts or these endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, and uninviting, and not a harbor on it? Mr. President, I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific coast one inch nearer to Boston.”
The name Oregon, it must be borne in mind, had a very much broader significance then than now, for the territory generally considered to be referred to by the term comprised the whole of the present States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and a portion of Montana.
Notwithstanding the systematic efforts of the Hudson’s Bay Company to keep them out, a considerable number of Americans—perhaps two or three hundred in all—had settled in the country watered by the Columbia, but they were greatly outnumbered by the Canadians and British, who held the balance of power. The American settlers believed that, under the terms of the treaty of 1819, whichever nation settled and organized the territory that nation would hold it. Though this was not directly affirmed in the terms of that treaty, it was the common sentiment of the statesmen of the period, Webster, then Secretary of State, having said, in the course of a letter to the British minister at Washington: “The ownership of the whole country (Oregon) will likely follow the greater settlement and larger amount of population.” The missionaries, recognizing the incalculable value of the country which the American Government was deliberately throwing away, did everything in their power to encourage immigration. Their glowing accounts of the fertility of the soil, the balmy climate, the wealth of timber, the incalculable water-power, the wealth in minerals had each year induced a limited number of daring souls to make the perilous and costly journey across the plains. In the autumn of 1842 a much larger party than any that had hitherto attempted the journey—one hundred and twenty in all—reached Waiilatpui. Among them was a highly educated and unusually well-informed man—General Amos Lovejoy. He was thoroughly posted in national affairs, and it was in the course of a conversation with him that Doctor Whitman first learned that the Webster-Ashburton treaty would probably be ratified before the adjournment of Congress in the following March. It was generally believed that this treaty related to the entire boundary between the United States and England’s North American possessions, the popular supposition being that it provided for the cession of the Oregon region to Great Britain in return for fishing rights off the coast of Newfoundland.
Doctor Whitman instantly saw that, as a result of the incredible ignorance and short-sightedness of the statesmen—or rather, the politicians who paraded as statesmen—at Washington, four great States were quietly slipping away from us without a protest. There was but one thing to do in such a crisis. He must set out for Washington. Though four thousand miles of Indian-haunted wilderness lay between him and the white city on the Potomac, he did not hesitate. Though winter was at hand, and the passes would be deep in snow and the plains destitute of pasturage, he did not falter. Though there was a rule of the American Board that no missionary could leave his post without obtaining permission from headquarters in Boston, Whitman shouldered all the responsibility. “I did not expatriate myself when I became a missionary,” was his reply to some objection. “Even if the Board dismisses me, I will do what I can to save Oregon to the nation. My life is of but little worth if I can keep this country for the American people.”[E]
Whitman’s friends in Oregon felt that he was starting on a ride into the valley of the shadow of death. They knew from their own experiences the terrible hardships of such a journey even in summer, when there was grass to feed the horses and men could live with comfort in the open air. It was resolved that he must not make the journey alone, and a call was made for a volunteer to accompany him. General Amos Lovejoy stepped forward and said quietly: “I will go with Doctor Whitman.” The doctor planned to start in five days, but, while dining with the Hudson’s Bay officials at Fort Walla Walla, an express messenger of the company arrived from Fort Colville, three hundred and fifty miles up the Columbia, and electrified his audience by announcing that a party of one hundred and forty British and Canadian colonists were on the road to Oregon. A young English clergyman, carried away with enthusiasm, sprang to his feet, waved his napkin above his head and shouted: “We’ve got the country—the Yankees are too late! Hurrah for Oregon!” Whitman, appreciating that things had now reached a pass where even hours were precious, quietly excused himself, hurried back to the mission at Waiilatpui, and made preparations for an immediate departure. The strictest secrecy was enjoined upon all the Americans whom Whitman had taken into his confidence, for had a rumor of his intentions reached British ears at this juncture it might have ruined everything. So it was given out that he was returning to Boston to advise the American Board against the contemplated removal of its missions in Oregon—an explanation which was true as far as it went.