How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon / A True Romance of Patriotic Heroism Christian Devotion and Final Martyrdom

by Oliver W. Nixon

With but little help, he opened up and cultivated a great farm, and built a grist-mill and a saw-mill, and when his grist-mill was burned, built another, and, at the same time, attended to his professional duties that covered a wide district. It was the wonder of every visitor to the Mission how one man, with so few helpers, accomplished so much. At the time of the massacre, the main building of the Mission was one hundred feet in the front, with an L running back seventy feet, and part of it two stories high. Every visitor remarked on the cleanliness and comfort and thrift which everywhere appeared.

There are men who, with great incentives, have accomplished great things, but were utter failures when it came to practical, every-day duties. Dr. Whitman, with a genius to conceive, and the will and energy to carry out the most difficult and daring undertaking, was just as faithful and efficient in the little things that made up the comforts of his wilderness home. Seeing these grand results—the commodious house, the increase in the herds and the stacks of grain—seems to have only angered his lazy, thriftless Indians, and they began to make demands for a division of his wealth.

Dr. Whitman has been accused of holding his Indians to a too strict moral accountability; that it would have been wiser to have been more lenient, and winked at, rather than denounced, some of their savage ways. Those who have carefully studied the man, know how impossible it would have been for him, in any seeming way, to condone a crime, or to purchase peace with the criminal by a bribe. This was the method of the Hudson Bay Company, and was doubtless the cheap way.

By a series of events and environments, he seems to have been trained much as Moses was, but with wholly different surroundings from those of the great Lawgiver, whose first training was in the Royal Court and the schools of Egypt; then in its army; then an outcast, and as a shepherd, guiding his flocks, and finding springs and pasturage in the land where, one day, he was to lead his people.

King David is another man made strong in the school of preparation. As he watched his flocks on the Judean hills, he fought the lion and the bear, and so was not afraid to meet and fight a giant, who defied the armies of the living God. It was there, under the stars, that he practiced music to quiet a mad king, and was educated into a fitness to organize the great choirs, and furnish the grand anthems for the temple worship. After this, in self-defense, he became the commander of lawless bands of men, and so was trained to command the armies of Israel.

So it has been in our own Nation, with Washington and Lincoln, and Grant and Garfield; they had to pass through many hardships, and receive a many-sided training before they were fitted for the greater work to which they were called. So it was, this strong, conscientious, somewhat restless young man was being trained for the life that was to follow. The farmer boy, planting and reaping, the millwright planning and building, the country doctor on his long, lonely rides, the religious teacher who must oversee the physical and spiritual wants of his fellow church members, all were needed in the larger life for which he was longing and looking, when the sad appeal for the "Book of Life" came from the Indian Chiefs who had come so far, and failed to find it. His immediate and hearty response was, "Here am I, send me!"

Dr. Marcus Whitman, judged by his life as a Missionary, must ever be given due credit; for no man ever gave evidence of greater devotion to the work he found to do. He was doubtless excelled as a teacher of the Indians by many of his co-laborers. He was not, perhaps, even eminent as a teacher. His great reputation and the honor due him, does not rest upon such a claim, but upon his wisdom in seeing the future of the Great West, and his heroic rescue of the land from a foreign rule. That he heard a call to the duty from a higher source than any earthly potentate, none but the skeptic will doubt. The act stands out clear and bold and strong, as one of the finest instances of unselfish patriotism recorded in all history.

DR. JOHN McLOUGHLIN.

Any sketch of pioneer Oregon would be incomplete without an honorable mention of Dr. John McLoughlin. He was the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Company, an organization inimical to American interests, both for pecuniary and political reasons, and like Whitman, has been maligned and misunderstood. As the leading spirit, during all the stages of pioneer life, his life and acts have an importance second to none. Nothing could have been more important for the comfort and peace of the Missionaries than to have had a man as Supreme Ruler of Oregon, with so keen a sense of justice, as had Dr. McLoughlin.

Physically he was a fine specimen of a man. He was six feet, four inches, and well-proportioned. His bushy white hair and massive beard, caused the Indians everywhere to call him, the "Great White Head Chief."