Acquisition Of Oregon And The Long Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman

Author : William I. Marshall
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331656357
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (563 download)

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Download or read book Acquisition of Oregon, Vol. 2 written by William I. Marshall and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Acquisition of Oregon, Vol. 2: And the Long Suppressed Evidence About Marcus Whitman "Great men never fear the truth, and wish nothing to be concealed from them." - Montesquieu. "I have been obliged to mention all these facts because they are true, and because the first duty of a writer who respects himself is not to conceal the truth" (Lomenies' "Beaumarchais and His Times," Vol. III., p. 224). Nothing even in the history of Oregon (which is so romantic even when truthfully written), more strikingly illustrates the aphorism "All history tends inevitably to myth," than the true story of the origin of the missions to the Oregon Indians, compared with the legendary accounts that the advocates of the Whitman Saved Oregon Story had evolved, only thirty-nine years after the four Flat Heads appeared in St. Louis in the autumn of 1831. Let us compare the legendary account of the visit of the Flat Heads with the contemporaneous ones. The account, quoted literally from Chapter XIII. of "Barrows' Oregon" (but omitting several pages of sentimental and most of it wholly irrelevant rhetoric), is as follows: "Four Flat Head Indians had come, in 1832, from Oregon, 3,000 miles, on a special mission of their own devising ... They had heard from an American trapper of the white man's God, and of a spirit home better than the hunting-grounds of the blessed and of a Book that told truly of the Great Spirit, and of that home and the trail to it. The report is that the Iroquois had given to them some of the Christian teachings which had become theirs in colonial New York; and very likely some of the mountain trappers, who left the white frontier and rude clearing and may be the Book and the family altar long years before, had done the same things ... "Twenty-seven years before Gen. William Clark had been over the mountains and left his name on their river ... This was the man to whom the four Flat Heads must open their business. Very likely the general thought they had come to talk of a war, or a treaty, or of lands, or of beaver. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.