BIOGRAPHICAL.--DR. MARCUS WHITMAN AND DR. JOHN McLOUGHLIN.
Dr. Marcus Whitman was a direct descendant of John Whitman of
Weymouth, who came from England in the ship Confidence, December,
1638. Of him it is recorded that he feared God, hated covetousness and
did good continually all the days of a long life.
Of the parents of Dr. Whitman, but little has been written. His
father, Beza Whitman, was born in Bridgewater, Connecticut, May 13,
1775. In March, 1797, he married Alice Green, of Mumford, Connecticut.
Two years later, with all of their worldly goods packed in an ox-cart,
they moved to Rushville, New York, Mrs. Whitman making a large part of
the tedious journey on foot, carrying her one-year-old babe in her
arms.
Settled in their new home, with Indians for near neighbors and
wilderness all about them, they began the struggle for life, and
though no great success rewarded their efforts, it is known that
their doors always swung open to the needy and their hands ministered
to the sick.
Mr. Whitman died April 7, 1810, at the early age of 35 years, leaving
his young wife to rear their family of four sons and one daughter.
Mrs. Whitman, though not a professing Christian, was a woman of much
energy and great endurance which, combined with strong Christian
principle, enabled her to look well to the ways of her household. She
lived to see every member of it an active Christian. She died
September 6th, 1857, aged 79, and was buried beside her husband near
Rushville, New York.
Dr. Marcus was her second son, and inherited from her a strong frame
and great endurance. After his father's death he was sent to his
paternal grandfather, Samuel Whitman, of Plainfield, Massachusetts,
where he remained ten years for training and education. There he
received a liberal training in the best schools the place afforded,
supplemented by a thorough course in Latin, and more advanced studies
under the minister of the place.
We know little of the boyhood spent there, as we should know little of
the whole life of Whitman, had not others lived to tell it, for he
neither told or wrote of it; he was too modest and too busy for that.
But we know it was the usual life of the Yankee boy, to bring the cows
and milk them, to cut the wood, and later to plow and sow the fields,
as we afterward find he knew how to do all these things. The strong,
sturdy boy of ceaseless activity and indomitable will who loved
hunting and exploring, and a touch of wild life, must have sometimes
given his old grandfather a trial of his mettle, but on the whole, no
doubt, he was a great comfort and help to his declining years.
After the death of his grandfather, he returned to the home of his
mother in Rushville. There he became a member of the Congregational
Church at the age of nineteen, and it is said was very desirous of
studying for the ministry, but by a long illness, and the persuasion
of friends, was turned from his purpose to the study of medicine.
He took a three years' course, and graduated at Fairfield, in 1824. He
first went to Canada, where he practiced his profession for four
years, then came back to his home, determined again to take up the
study for the ministry, but was again frustrated in his design, and
practiced his profession four years more in Wheeler, N. Y., where he
was a member and an elder in the Presbyterian Church. He and a brother
also owned a saw-mill near there, where he assisted in his spare
hours, and so learned another trade that was most useful to him in
later life. In fact, as we see his environments in his Mission Station
in Oregon, these hard lessons of his earlier years seem to have been,
in the best sense of the word, educational.
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."
He was born in 1784, and was eighteen years older than Dr. Whitman.
He entered the Northwestern Fur Company's service in 1800. He
afterward studied medicine, and for a time practiced his profession,
but his fine business abilities were so apparent, that in 1824 we find
him at the head of affairs in Oregon. His power over the rough men in
the employ of the Company, and the savage tribes who filled their
coffers with wealth, was so complete as to be phenomenal.
In many of the sketches we have shown that his kindness to the pioneer
Missionaries in another and a higher sense, proved his manhood. To
obey the orders of his company, and still remain a humane man, was
something that required tact that few men could have brought to bear
as well as Dr. McLoughlin. While he did slaughter, financially
speaking, traders and fur gatherers right and left, and did his best
to serve the pecuniary interests of his great monopoly, he drew the
line there, and was the friend and the helper of the missionaries.
If the reader could glance through Mrs. Whitman's diary upon the very
opening week of her arrival in Oregon, there would not be found
anything but words of kindness and gratitude to Dr. McLoughlin. In
justice to his company, to which he was always loyal, he pushed the
Methodist missions far up the Willamette, and those of the American
Board three hundred miles in another direction. But at the same time
he was a friend and brother and adviser, and anything he had was at
their service, whether they had money or not.
After the immigration in 1842, and the larger immigration led by
Whitman in 1843, the company in England became alarmed and sent out
spies--Messrs. Park, Vavasaur and Peel, who were enjoined to find out
whether McLoughlin was loyal to British interests. After many months
spent in studying the situation, their adverse report is easily
inferred from the fact that Dr. McLoughlin was ordered to report to
headquarters. The full history of that secret investigation has never
yet been revealed, but when it is, the whole blame will be found
resting upon Whitman and his missionary co-workers, who wrested the
land from English rule, and that Dr. McLoughlin aided them to success.
When the charge of "Friendship to the missionaries," was made, the old
doctor flared up and replied: "What would you have? Would you have me
turn the cold shoulder on the men of God who came to do that for the
Indians which this company has neglected to do? If we had not helped
the immigrants in '42 and '43 and '44, and relieved their necessities,
Fort Vancouver would have been destroyed and the world would have
treated us as our inhuman conduct deserved; every officer of the
Company, from Governor down, would have been covered with obloquy,
and the Company's business ruined!"
But it all resulted in the resignation of Dr. McLoughlin. The
injustice he received at the hands of Americans afterward, is deeply
to be regretted, and it is greatly to the credit of the thinking
people of the State of Oregon that they have done their best to remedy
the wrong. At many times, and in a multitude of ways, Dr. McLoughlin,
by his kindness to the missionaries, won for himself the gratitude of
thinking Americans in all the years to come. With a bad man in his
place as Chief Factor, the old missionaries would have found life in
Oregon well-nigh unbearable. While true to the exclusive and selfish
interests of the great monopoly he served, he yet refused to resort to
any form of unmanliness.
After his abuse by the English company and his severance of all
connection with it, he settled at Oregon City and lived and died an
American citizen. The tongue of slander was freely wagged against him,
and his declining years were made miserable by unthinking Americans
and revengeful Englishmen. His property, of which he had been
deprived, was returned to his heirs, and to-day his memory is
cherished as among Oregon's benefactors. A fine oil painting of Dr.
McLoughlin was secured and paid for by the old pioneers and presented
to the State.
The Hon. John Minto, in making the address at the hanging of the
picture, closed with these words:
"In this sad summary of such a life as Dr. McLoughlin's, there is a
statement that merits our attention, which, if ever proven true, and
no man who ever knew Dr. McLoughlin will doubt that he believed it
true, namely, that he prevented war between Great Britain and the
United States, will show that two of the greatest nations on this
earth owe him a debt of gratitude, and that Oregon, in particular, is
doubly bound to him as a public benefactor. British state papers may
some day prove all this.
"It is now twenty-six years since the Legislative Assembly of the
State of Oregon, so far as restoration of property to Dr. McLouglin's
family could undo the wrong of Oregon's Land Bill, gave gladness to
the heart of every Oregon pioneer worthy of the name. All of them yet
living, now know that, good man as they believed him, he was better
than they knew. They see him now, after the strife and jealousies of
race, national, business, and sectarian interests are allayed,
standing in the center of all these causes of contention--a position
in which to please all parties was impossible, to 'Maintain which,
only a good man could bear with patience'--and they have adopted this
means of conveying their appreciation of this great forbearance and
patient endurance, combined with his generous conduct.
"Looking, then, at this line of action in the light of the merest
glimpses of history, known to be true by witnesses living, can any
honest man wonder that the pioneers of Oregon, who have eaten the salt
of this man's hospitality, who have been the eye-witnesses to his
brave care for humanity, and participators in his generous aid, are
unwilling to go to their graves in silence--which would imply base
ingratitude--a silence which would be eloquent with falsehood?
"Governor and Representatives of Oregon: In recognition of the worthy
manner in which Dr. John McLoughlin filled his trying and responsible
position, in the heartfelt glow of a grateful remembrance of his
humane and noble conduct to them, the Oregon pioneers leave this
portrait with you, hoping that their descendants will not forget the
friend of their fathers, and trusting that this gift of the men and
women who led the advance which has planted thirty thousand rifles in
the Valley of the Columbia, and three hundred thousand, when needed,
in the National Domain facing the Pacific Ocean, will be deemed worthy
of a place in your halls."
[Illustration: DR. JOHN MCLOUGHLIN,
Chief Factor of Hudson Bay Co., at Fort Walla Walla.]