On this episode of “This is Oregon Country,” we hear a poem written by Alice Wellington Rollins, an American writer who was born in 1847 in Boston, Massachusetts and who died in Bronxville, New York in 1897.

The poem is called “Whitman’s Ride.” It uses the familiar structure of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” to commemorate Marcus Whitman’s 1842 journey from the Oregon Country to the East Coast.

The poem was printed in the book,“How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon” written by Oliver W. Nixon and published in Chicago in 1895. Rollins’ poem is believed to have originally appeared in a periodical called the “New York Independent” and then in the 1886 book “Representative Poems of Living Poets.”

In the poem, read by Feliks Banel, we hear a heroic telling of Walla Walla missionary Marcus Whitman’s much debated and largely discredited role in “saving Oregon”—that is, in convincing the American government in the 1840s to stand firm against the British and acquire the Oregon Country for the United States.