Talk:Cephas Washburn

Source for "Apostle to the Cherokees"
A Google search today for the uncited phrase, "Apostle to the Cherokees", turned up only a hit for a letter from Rev. David Greene to William Nutting of Randolph VT in 1836. This hit was a catalog page from PBA Galleries offering the original document for sale. I doubt that this would satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for an identifiable source, because it does not make clear whether Greene originated this description that supposedly identified Cephas Washburn as the person meant by the phrase. Therefore, I have removed the statement from the introductory paragraph of this article. Bruin2 (talk) 05:45, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

A very similar situation exists for the descriptive phrase, "Builder of Presbyterianism in Arkansas", except that there were a number of hits that still did not identify the real origin of the phrase. Taken together, it seems that these two phrases may have resulted from "circular reporting," in which multiple sources have reported the same factoid, until the true origin has become lost. Again, I have removed both of these from the current article.Bruin2 (talk) 05:59, 12 February 2019 (UTC)