She pointedly denies that Dr. Whitman went to Washington or the States with the expectation of bringing out settlers to Oregon. The letters recently published by the State Historical Society of Oregon, quoted in another chapter, were written by Dr. Whitman the year following his famous journey. In them he clearly reveals the reasons for the ride to Washington. The reader can believe Dr. Whitman or believe Mrs. Victor, but both cannot be believed. In addition to these letters, we have the clear testimony of General Lovejoy, who went with him; of Rev. Mr. Spalding, of Elkanah Walker, Dr. Gray, Rev. Cushing Eells, P. B. Whitman, who accompanied him on his return trip; Mr. Hinman, Dr. S. J. Parker, of Ithaca, N. Y., and the Rev. William Barrows, who had frequent conversations with him in St. Louis. In an interview with Dr. William Geiger, published in the New York Sun, January 17th, 1885, he says: "I was at Fort Walla Walla, and associated directly with Dr. Whitman when he started East to save Oregon. I was there when he returned, and I am, perhaps, the only living person who distinctly recollects all the facts. He left, not to go to St. Louis or to Boston, but for the distinct purpose of going to Washington to save Oregon; and yet he had to be very discreet about it." Will the honest reader of history reject such testimony as worthless, and mark that of these modern skeptics valuable? Mrs. Victor's charges, that selfishness and personal aggrandizement accounted for all the sacrifices made by Whitman, are preposterous in the light of testimony, and made utterly untenable by the environments of the Missionary. There was no time in all the years that Dr. and Mrs. Whitman lived in Oregon that they could not have packed all their worldly goods upon the backs of two mules. The American Board made no bribe of money to the men and women they sent out to Oregon and elsewhere. If the great farm he opened at Waiilatpui, and the buildings he erected by his patient toil, had grown to be worth a million, it would not have added a single dollar to Whitman's wealth. Even the physician's fees given him by grateful sufferers, under the rules of the Board, were reported and counted as a part of his meager salary. The idea that a man should leave wife and home, and endure the perils of a mid-winter journey to the States, to persuade Congress "To buy sheep" and "make his Mission a stopping place," or the American Board to allow him to work sixteen hours a day for the Cayuse Indians, is a heavy task on credulity, and is so far-fetched as to make Whitman's maligners only ridiculous.