A.—Yes, he gave that; that amounts to the same as he has given in his statement.
Q.—Did you have any fears, while at the station, that Mr. Smith was liable, had the circumstances become more dangerous, to act with the Indians?
A.—Certainly I did.
Q.—Did you get any reason why Bewley and Sales were killed?
A.—Though I did not get it directly from them, the Indian account was, the great chief at the Umatilla said their disease would spread; but I believe it was because Bewley had spoken before Stanfield unadvisedly.
(Signed,)
Elam Young.
Sworn and subscribed to before me, this 20th day of January, 1849.
G. W. Coffinbury, Justice of the Peace.
What shall we say of these depositions, and the facts asserted under the solemnity of an oath, the witnesses still living, with many others confirming the one fact, that Roman priests and Hudson’s Bay men, English and Frenchmen, were all safe and unharmed in an Indian—and that American—territory, while American citizens were cut down by savage hands without mercy? Can we regard the conduct of such men in any other light than as enemies in peace? Without the aid of religious bigotry and the appeal to God as sending judgments upon them, not one of those simple-minded natives would ever have lifted a hand to shed the blood of their teachers or of American citizens. We see how faithful and persevering Joe Lewis, Finlay, and Stanfield were in their part, while the bishop and his priests, and Sir James Douglas, at Vancouver, were watching at a distance to misrepresent the conduct of the dead, and excuse and justify their own instruments, as in Mr. Douglas’s letters to Governor Abernethy and the Sandwich Islands; and Vicar-General Brouillet’s narrative, with more recent proceedings, which are given in another chapter.
We intended to give in this connection the account of this tragedy as given by Vicar-General Brouillet, but it accords so nearly with that given by Sir James Douglas in his Sandwich Islands letter to Mr. Castle, that the impression is irresistibly forced upon the mind that the whole account is prepared by one and the same person; hence we will not encumber our pages with more than a liberal amount of extracts, sufficient to show the full knowledge of the bishop and his priests of what was expected to take place at the Whitman station, and the brutal and inhuman part they took in forcing Miss Bewley into the arms of Five Crows, after that Indian was humane enough to permit her to return to the house of those, that Mr. Young, and all others who were ignorant of their vileness, might naturally suppose would be a place of safety from such treatment. She that was Miss Bewley is now dead, but she has left on record the statement of her wrongs. We give it a permanent place in our history, not to persecute or slander the Jesuit fraternity (for truth is no slander), but to warn Americans against placing their daughters and sons under any such teachings or influences.