Note E — THE PREACHER WHO RODE FOR AN EMPIRE

It is a regrettable fact that this, one of the finest episodes in our national history, from being a subject of honest controversy has degenerated into an embittered and rancorous quarrel, some of Doctor Whitman’s detractors, not content with questioning the motives which animated him in his historic ride, having gone so far as to cast doubts on the fact of the ride itself and even to assail the character of the great missionary. Full substantiation of the episode as I have told it may be found, however, in Barrows’s “Oregon, the Struggle for Possession,” Johnson’s “History of Oregon,” Dye’s “McLoughlin and Old Oregon,” and Nixon’s “How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon,” an array of authorities which seem to me sufficient.