Besides, they became thoroughly convinced that the man and the missionary had received a call from a higher source than an earthly one, and a missionary board should not stand in the way. It was resolved that he must not be allowed to make such a journey alone. A call was at once made, "Who will volunteer to go with him?" Again the unseen power was experienced when General Lovejoy said: "I will go with Dr. Whitman."
The man seems to have been sent for just such a purpose. Aside from the fact that he was tired out with the long five months' ride upon the plains, and had not been fully rested, no better man could have been chosen. He was an educated, Christian gentleman, full of cheerfulness, brave, cautious, and a true friend.
MRS. NARCISSA PRENTICE WHITMAN.
Mrs. Whitman, in her diary, dwells upon this with loving thoughtfulness, and her soul breaks forth in thanksgiving to the good Father above, who has sent so good and true a companion for the long and dangerous journey. She refers to it again and again that he will have a friend in his hours of peril and danger, and not have to depend entirely upon the savages for his society.
The conference passed a resolution, as stated, giving leave of absence and fixed the time for his starting in "five days" from that day. It was not often they had such an opportunity for letter-carriers, and each began a voluminous correspondence.
The Doctor set about his active preparations, arranging his outfit and seeing that everything was in order. The next day he had a call to see a sick man at old Fort Walla Walla, and as he needed many articles for his journey which could be had there, he went with this double purpose. He found at the Fort a score or more of traders, clerks and leading men of the Hudson Bay Company, assembled there. They were nearly all Englishmen, and the discussion soon turned upon the treaty, and the outlook, and as might be inferred, was not cheering to Whitman. But his object was to gain information and not to argue.
The dinner was soon announced and the Doctor sat down to a royal banquet with his jovial English friends. For no man was more highly esteemed by all than was Whitman. The chief factor at Vancouver, Dr. McLoughlin, from the very outset of their acquaintance, took a liking to both the Doctor and Mrs. Whitman, and in hundreds of cases showed them marked and fatherly kindness. Mrs. Whitman, in her diary, recently published in the proceedings of the Oregon State Historical Society, mainly in the years 1891 and 1893, often refers to the fatherly kindness of the good old man whose home she shared for weeks and months, and he begged her when first reaching Oregon to stop all winter and wait until her own humble home could be made comfortable.
But while the company were enjoying their repast, an express messenger of the company arrived from Fort Colville, three hundred and fifty miles up the Columbia, and electrified his audience by the announcement that a colony of one hundred and forty Englishmen and Canadians were on the road.