USA > Washington > History of Washington the evergreen state : from early dawn to daylight with portraits and biographies Vol. II > Part 10
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" Bold, adventurous, and eloquent, he possessed an unlimit- ed sway over his people, and by the earnestness of his purpose and the persuasiveness of his arguments carried with him
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all who heard him speak. He travelled by day and night, caring neither for hunger nor fatigue, visited the camps of the Yakimas and Kliketats, addressing their councils in terms of eloquence such as they had seldom heard. He crossed the Columbia, pene- trated to Southern Oregon, and appealed to all the disaffected there. He dwelt upon their wrongs ; painted to them, in the exuberance of his imagination, the terrible picture of the ' polakly illeha,' the land of darkness, where no ray of sunlight ever penetrated ; where there was torture and death for all Ind- ians ; where the sting of an insect killed like the stroke of a spear, and the streams were so foul and muddy that no living thing could drink of their waters. This was the place where the white man wanted to carry then. He called upon them to resist like braves so terrible a fate. The white men were but a hand- ful now. They could all be killed at once, and then others would fear to come. But if there was no war they would grow strong and many, and put all the Indians in their big ships and send them off to that terrible land, where torture and death awaited them."
We can hardly imagine arguments better fitted to carry out the purpose for which they were designed. With the condition of things then existing, it was like carrying a lighted torch through a powder magazine. But his eloquent appeals met with no little opposition even among those whom they were intended to inflame. There were cooler heads and less poetical tempera- ments among the older and wiser chiefs, and those better in- formed as to the white man's latent power. They were divided among themselves. Had they been united, they might have re- stored Washington to its primitive forests. The Nez Perces not only remained faithful, but even organized to resist the hostiles should they attempt to carry out these plans. They had proved their good-will before when they defeated the project of the Cayuses to cut off Governor Stevens and his little treaty-mak- ing band with their escort.
Too impatient to wait, the tribes of the North opened the campaign-a series of murders, chief among which was that of Indian Agent Bolen, treacherously killed by the Yakimas, who came up behind him ; two talked with the unsuspecting man in front while a third fell behind and shot him in the back ; his body was then scalped and partially buried. This called out one
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hundred men from Fort Steilacoom, while Major Rains, after- ward a Confederate general, advanced by way of the Columbia. The two forces were to unite in the enemy's territory. This attempt to punish the Indians saw anything but a satisfactory result. The Steilacoom command, met in the mountains by an overwhelming Indian force, were obliged to retire to their west- ern slope. Major Haller was then ordered to advance from the Dalles with a similar force, but the region of the Dalles fared even worse than that of Steilacoom. Surrounded in a position where they had neither wood nor water, they were forced to re- treat, losing three killed, nineteen wounded, thirty pack ani- mals, and being obliged to cache their mountain howitzer, which was, however, afterward recovered. Major Rains with three hundred and fifty Regulars then took the field in person, but beyond a few unimportant skirmishes and some destruction of Indian property failed to better the general result. In the South the war was precipitated by a mistaken attack of the whites upon suspected friendlies-Rogue Rivers of Old Sam's band. Then came the usual return ball of retaliation-murder and rob- bery, with outrage of every description, ravaging the land. The Indians destroyed the whites wherever they could attack them at an advantage, and the Volunteers, exasperated at the sight of fiendishly butchered women and children, not unnaturally favored a war of extermination.
In the North, Yellow Serpent-a name which done into classic Indian exhausts too much space-whose policy seemed of that negative order which neither goes nor stays, was held a prisoner in our camp ; it was necessary to bind him, as his friends were attacking the camp. In attempting to do so, the chief and his companions drew their knives, and with the exception of one young Indian, who offered no resistance, were immediately killed. This settled the question with those who still halted between peace and war, throwing the balance in favor of the lat- ter. The Walla Wallas, Cayuses, Umatillas, Pelouses, and Des Chutes forthwith joined the hostiles. This enabled the Indians to put a force of six hundred warriors into the field, who straight- way attacked the Volunteers, but were driven across the Colum- bia, with little loss on either side.
This outbreak was followed by the Indians of Puget Sound declaring war, the ubiquitous Leschi with other chiefs being the
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principal factors in bringing it about. So secret were their plans and so suddenly did they strike that many unsuspecting settlers were cut off by Indians whom they supposed to be per- fectly friendly. General alarm and consternation prevailed. Some were even driven to take refuge on vessels, while others fled to Seattle, which the Indians, with unusual boldness, soon after openly attacked. Meanwhile, Kings County was devastated and many homes destroyed. Of the attack upon Seattle we shall speak in its proper place in our sketch of the " Queen City." In all this high carnival of war, extending as it did from the mountains to the sound, the whites had just one advantage besides the protection of their own good rifles and brave hearts -- the Indians were divided in their own councils, many of their chiefs favoring peace and holding no particular enmity to the whites, by whom, as a rule, they had been well treated. This was specially true of the Flat Heads and Nez Perces ; hence there was a door left open for diplomacy, and the tongue if not the pen, backed by a judicious distribution of presents, not infre- quently proved mightier than the sword.
Things would have been in better shape and the war brought more speedily to an end, with a saving of many lives and much valuable property, if the commanding officer of the Department, General Wool, had been better acquainted with Indian fighting, to say nothing of frontier privations, dangers, and needs. As it was, he was little better than a drag and a disorganizer. He held back troops in his official capacity when he should have hurried them into the field. He had nothing in common with the views of governors Stevens and Curry ; refused to undertake those winter campaigns against the Indians which after experi- ence proved to be the most efficacious-the Indians not expect- ing attack, and therefore open to surprise. He declined to recognize Volunteers as United States troops, and seemed far more interested in protecting the "friendly" Indians, and in some instances those whose loyalty was more than doubtful, than in defending the settlers from their attacks. In all of which Governor Palmer, who supported the ideas of General Wool, fully sustained and assisted him, until finally the Oregon Legislature was impelled to petition the general Government for the removal of both. This request ended in the removal of Palmer, but relegated him to the office of Superintendent of Ind-
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ian Affairs, where his power to do mischief, with General Wool at his back, was, if anything, increased. This pleasant condi- tion of things brought about a sort of triangular, or possibly we should rather say quadrangular, duel between the gentlemen men- tioned-Stevens and Curry versus Wool and Palmer-which, taking the harmless and somewhat Pickwickian form of paper bullets, reports, and newspaper articles, killed none of their writers, but, we greatly fear, indirectly added to the number of slain settlers and ruined homes. In this connection it is worth mentioning that General Scott, even then rapidly becoming superannuated and more and more bound up, as the years added another frost-flake to his honored head, with the idea that there was one General Scott and afterward -- the deluge, endorsed all of General Wool's reports. "I fully approve the views of Gen- eral Wool .- Winfield Scott." Yet Stevens and Curry still lived.
So it came to pass that the Regulars and the Volunteers, like their chiefs, " agreed to disagree," both endeavoring to work out their salvation according to their own theories in the premises ; the Regulars going in for treaty-making pacification, while the Volunteers were wedded to their frontier faith that a dead Ind- ian is a good Indian, one permanently to be relied on, and were, therefore, equally strong in their extermination belief. Both acted up to their convictions to the extent of their ability, but brought little or nothing to pass, while the Indians, operating with better success, succeeded in massacring Captain Wright's party, as already narrated.
Early in the spring Wool (and the Indians) having got ready to act, Colonel Wright, of the Ninth Infantry, was sent up the Columbia to engineer the summer campaign. His very first step was an error, and showed that he either did not understand their tactics or else undervalued his foes. Passing the Cascades, he left a sergeant with only nine men to protect the block-house at the portage. The very day that he marched out with the main body the Yakimas, under Kamiakin, attacked the settlers there at the Cascades, and Wright's evidently insufficient force had quite as much as they could do to protect themselves. It ended in what was called the Cascade Massacre, involving the loss of seventeen whites killed, including one soldier and several women and children, attended by the usual house-burning's and Indian barbarities. Wright, warned of this misfortune by messenger,
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immediately countermarched, and after a brisk skirmish relieved the survivors, besieged behind their defences, which had been repeatedly fired by the Indians, but, fortunately, without effect. Here he lingered long enough to do at least one good deed by hanging a chief and eight braves of the Cascade tribe, supposed to be friendly, who had only waited till his back was turned to be active in the massacre. Resuming his march, he left a stronger force to guard the Cascades, under the command of Lieutenant, afterward the gallant "Little Phil"' Sheridan, of Union fame, who so distinguished himself that even the stolid German commanders, little given to extol a foreign officer, pro- nounced him the first cavalry general in the world. Sheridan showed the stuff he was made of while serving as a subal- tern at the Cascades, by circumventing and defeating the sav- ages, and even making their squaws, greatly against their will, but under threats of dire consequences to the old ladies, hold their tongues and drag his canoes, loaded with soldiers, to sur- prise their friends. Wright's campaign, from a military point of view, was not a brilliant success. The Indians declined a general engagement, which he vainly endeavored to bring about, but meanwhile suffered not a little from being deprived of their fisheries and other sources of supply. Numerous councils were held, at which ranking chiefs of hostile views were ignored while those of lesser rank, but inclined to be peaceable, were recog- nized. So various bands came in, and being assured that their lands would not be taken from them, concluded to bury the hatchet and promised henceforth to live peaceably.
Turning to the South, we find Lieutenant-Colonel Buchanan, assisted by Indian Agent Palmer, trying the conciliation, treaty- making policy with less effect. Here the Indians were deter- mined to fight it out, John, their leader, giving as his reason for so doing the very excellent one, as far as he was concerned, that if the whites caught him they would kill him, and he therefore never intended to surrender. On May 27th his band surrounded Captain Smith's command at Big Bend, on the Rogue River, and though Smith had ninety men and a howitzer, killed eight and wounded eighteen of his men, besides besieging him for thirty-six hours. Smith's command would indeed have been utterly annihilated, for his situation was growing desperate, when Captain Auger arrived with a re-enforcement, and by a
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dashing charge, in which he lost two killed and three wounded, dislodged the Indians and raised the siege. This was the only battle of the war worthy to be called such. Later on matters were settled up (patched up being the better word with most Indian settlements generally), John's band surrendered, where- upon the hostiles concluded to treat.
In the North a few of the hostiles fled to the interior, but through the efforts of Lieutenant-Colonel Casey the main body, with a few exceptions, who were held as prisoners, were relegated to small reservations on the sound. The interior Indians cer- tainly had the best of it, for the Regular officers not only recom- mended that Governor Stevens' treaties should not be ratified, but at the same time entirely turned over the whole country east of the Cascades to the sole occupancy of the savages. Colonel Wright ordered that no white man should occupy land east of these mountains but those (probably "squaw men," meaning white men who had intermarried with the tribes) whom the Ind- ians might permit, except the miners at Colville, and these were to be punished if they molested the natives. Military stations were established among the tribes to protect them, it would seem, from the whites, Lieutenant Sheridan being put in com- mand of one in the Yakima country. We doubt if the like ever was paralleled on the pages of civilized history-a tract of country equalling many of the European States in its area, relegated to savagery and Indian domination, literally barred to white occu- pancy by the edict of a commander sent to their country to put down with a strong hand and punish these very Indians for murders and barbarities committed by them upon the whites, now for an indefinite period to be excluded. The loss of life had been great, the destruction of property enormous, both by abso- lute burning and plundering on the part of the Indians, as well as by. that wrought by desertion, where the occupants had fled for their lives, leaving all their goods behind them. The condi- tion of the country at the time of which we write is thus de- scribed by a gentleman who passed over the road from Cowlitz Landing to Olympia in 1857. He says, referring to the general state of alarm :
" Notwithstanding this region was exempt from any actual collision with the Indians, the effects are nearly the same as in other parts of the Territory. All along the road houses are de-
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serted and going to ruin ; fences are cast down and in a state of decay ; fields, once waving with luxuriant crops, lie desolate ; and but little if any stock are to be seen on the broad prairies that formerly bore such inspiring evidences of life."
There are few events in life, however tragic, where some grim joke or concealed pleasantry does not lurk, if one have the wit to discover it. Nor is this ghastly Indian question without its ameliorations. The butterfly lounges upon the skull ; the gob- lins of queer fancies peep out through the unglazed windows of its dismantled eye chambers-as witness the following :
The first was an incident of the religious duel preceding the terrible " Mountain Massacre," where both Catholics and Prot- estants so signalized themselves as combatants, that we are con- strained to believe the poet who summed up the condition of Ire- land as being inhabited by men
" Fighting like devils for conciliation, And hating one another for the love of God"
must have had them in mind when he wrote.
Among other methods of teaching, the priests told the Ind- ians that if they followed the doctrines of the Protestants they would go to hell. The Protestants were not slow in imparting the same cheerful intelligence in regard to the ultimate destiny of those who listened to the priests. The priests then devised an object lesson ; they exhibited to the Indians a colored design of a tree surmounted by a cross which they called the " Catholic tree." It showed the Protestants continually going out on the limbs and falling off their ends into fires which were being fed with Protestant books by priests, while the Catholics were climb- ing with the safe agility of monkeys up the trunk to reach the em- blem of salvation with which it was decorated. Mr. Spaulding, one of the Protestant missionaries, was equal to the occasion. He had his wife paint a series of pictures in water-colors, the last and crowning one of which showed the " broad way that leadeth to destruction" crowded with priests, who were tumbling into hell at the terminus, while the Protestants ascended the nar- row path to glory. And while all this folly and child's play with sacred words and emblems was going on on both sides, the " innocent" natives, to whom they were thus combatively teach- ing the religion of peace, were themselves plotting the butchery even then almost ripe for execution.
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The other instance was that of a chief confined for some criminality in the guard house at Steilacoom. While thus in durance he was taken ill, and cured by the surgeon of the post with doses of some red colored liquid. The Indian, utterly igno- rant of its contents, was, however, deeply impressed with the tint, and on his enlargement and return to his tribe, declared himself a doctor, who had discovered the medicine of the whites. An opportunity for testing his boasted skill soon offered. Three of his fellow-warriors were taken ill, and he proceeded, in an evil hour for himself, to prescribe for them ; holding the red color still in mind, he mixed some red paint with water, administered it freely, and within a day or two three more braves had joined the " good Indians" in the spirit land. The mourners, not en- tirely satisfied with the result, annexed to their funeral obse- quies a little celebration of their own. The doctor, then fortu- nately too drunk to resist, was waited on, beguiled into a vacant lodge, and there so thoroughly dissected that an Indian jury of inquest, had such been in vogue, would have found little more than his backbone to investigate.
So much for the territorial Indian wars, or, we should rather say, a few examples of such, for if the history of Washington ante- dating her statehood should be written in two kinds of ink-the Indian murders and outrages in red, and her civil history, entire- ly unconnected with such, in black-the red lines, like a stream of blood, would flow through every page of the record.
In her early struggles Washington received but little real as- sistance from the federal Government beyond the filling of offices, which gave opportunities for the bestowal of political patronage. With a revenue cutter on the sound under a smart captain, a regi- ment or two of men like the Texas Rangers, who would have fought Indians " Indian fashion," and, as a United States officer did on another field, report as the result, " All killed and none wound- ed ," we should have had less of treaties, more " bad Indians" per- manently converted, and fewer murders of whites. Pray under- stand that the author has not a word to say against the gallantry or devotion to duty, as they understood it, of the Regular officers actually in the field during the territorial Indian wars. Far from it ; but they were handicapped from the start. They did not understand the nature or give credit to the utter treachery of their foes. They were too regular in action and too humane
8
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in the hour of victory. The Indians set down their mercy and chivalrous ideas in regard to women and children to cowardice, whereas a few instances of stern retaliation-horrible as it is to contemplate it-without regard to age or sex, would have made the Indians draw the line and spare the wives and infants of the whites. Sherman himself has told us that " war is hell," and we add that with fiendish atrocities to contend with, the more devilish we make it the sooner is it over. But this no Regular officer could have countenanced. The peace party at the East, who never heard a war-whoop or saw the gentle savage dancing round a burning man bound to their torture post, while the equally gentle squaw and her children thrust splinters into his quivering limbs, while they encouraged the bucks to greater bar- barities, would have risen en masse to condemn such cruelties if inflicted on the red devils of the forest. And here let us give those who are already accusing the author in their minds of un- feeling suggestions a selection from the incidents of the Ward massacre, perpetrated by a band of some thirty Shoshones or Snake Indians upon a party of innocent and unoffending immi- grants during the summer of 1854, near Fort Boise. They had gone recklessly forward, neither fearing nor suspecting danger, with arms rusty from long disuse, and were attacked, overpowered, and murdered, with the exception of a boy of thirteen, who, though severely wounded, hid in the bushes and succeeded in making his escape. We cull from Evans' narrative the follow- ing :
" The eldest Miss Ward, who attempted to escape by flight, was pursued, and made such resistance that the enraged Indians shot her in the head. The murderous wretches then set fire to one of the wagons, heated an iron, and with it mutilated her dead body. With the surviving women and children and four wagons the Indians started for their camp on the Boise River, about a mile distant. When they reached the bush they burned up three wagons. Having outraged Mrs. White in the most horrible manner, they shot her in the head and instantly killed her. Mrs. Ward and three small children were placed in the last re- maining wagon and taken to the Indian camp, only to be subject- ed to such torture as none but an Indian can conceive. The three children were put into the wagon, which was then set on fire. They held the children by their hair across the burning
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wagon until they were slowly roasted to death, their mother being compelled to stand by and witness their agonies. Having been subjected to the same cruel penalty which Mrs. White had suffered, she was finally despatched with a blow from a toma- hawk." It is a comfort to know that eight of these wretches were afterward hung on the spot where they had exulted in the sufferings of these little children slowly burned to death. We commend this bit of frontier history to the consideration of the peace party. For ourselves, we would have been glad to know that a righteous vengeance had exterminated these well-named Snakes in all save this, as we have said before, the rattlesnake gives notice when he is about to strike, but these human serpents-never ! Then, again, between red tape at Washington and one old granny at San Francisco and another old granny to favorably endorse his reports at the War Department, the way was rendered still more difficult for both soldier and settler. The Territory asked arms to defend the firesides of the people; they were refused on trifling grounds. She asked protection for the sound, and did not get it. She raised Volunteers, they were not accepted. Every difficulty was thrown in the way of her executives, and that, too, to gratify a personal spite by a general whose previous record should have taught him better things. It was a shame and a humiliation that once and again we were obliged to ask aid and receive assistance, notably after the Whitman massacre, of the Hudson's Bay Fur Company's officials, to whose indirect agency at least these very outrages were due. Thus the Regular officer stood between two or possibly three fires. If he did not punish the savage marauder, the settler, fresh from the sacking of his home and the slaughter of his dear ones, complained bit- terly of a duty ill performed. If he did kill Indians, the peace party of the East lifted up their hands in holy horror at the in - humanities of Christian men, and straightway attacked the offender through the War Department. While the third fire to which he was exposed was that of the Indians themselves, who surprised him if they could, fled when outnumbered, and not being particularly hampered by any scruples of humanity, roasted him at the stake when he was so unfortunate as to fall into their hands. Take it all in all, it was a warfare in which failure was almost more successful than success, and certainly, in the eyes of many, more respectable. Harney understood Indian fighting, Wool did not.
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