The Missionary Who Claimed the Pacific Northwest
A century of folklore credits Marcus Whitman with winning Oregon and Washington for the United States through a patriotic Fourth of July ritual.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The state of Oregon has special reason to celebrate the Fourth of July with enthusiasm. It was at one time very doubtful whether the Oregon territory, now divided between Oregon and Washington, would be the possession of the United States or Great Britain. Marcus Whitman, a missionary sent by the Methodist board of Boston to carry the Bible to the Indians, crossed the mountains and entered the Columbia valley in 1836. On the Fourth of July, 1836, the missionary Whitman stood upon the banks of the Columbia and entered into Oregon. When Whitman returned to report the region, he recalled the day and the vow he made, and he and his wife were the first white women who had ever crossed the Rockies. While the company gathered around the pole, he with prayer and possession took the West in the name of the Lord. The diplomatic negotiations that resulted in the treaty of 1846 with Great Britain owed much to the claim that the United States rested upon the discovery and possession of this noble territory thus taken in the name of the church by Whitman upon the Fourth of July.
“With prayer and possession, he took the West in the name of the Lord.”
The 'Whitman legend'—the idea that the missionary saved the Northwest from British rule—was a potent foundation myth in late 19th-century Pacific Northwest civic identity. Today, this story is widely recognized by historians as a fabrication popularized decades after the event, illustrating how early settlers crafted nationalistic narratives to justify the American occupation of Indigenous lands.
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