USA > Washington > History of Washington the evergreen state : from early dawn to daylight with portraits and biographies Vol. II > Part 9
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54
This deposition of the unhappy Miss Bewley was taken De- cember 12th, 1848, and her statements have never been either explained away or denied from any quarter up to the present hour, not even in Father Brouillet's own defence, published more than four years afterward, though he was fully aware of the story she had told of her wrongs. The only allusion he makes to it is that he " was afflicted" to hear of her violation. Pity it is that he and his cowardly confrères could not have lived in the good old days of Southwestern Texas, where, if her murdered brother could only have escaped the assassin, he might have afflicted these "holy" fathers to some purpose. How this Bishop Blanchet, the facts being known, was ever per- mitted to see or sympathize with his Indian accomplices at the time of their execution in Oregon seems a mystery. They were certainly a very amiable people. If we understand the law, the bishop, in forcing Miss Bewley to accompany the Indian to the lodge of Five Crows, well knowing the fate that awaited her, made himself an accomplice before the act, and should have been punished accordingly.
The priest, Brouillet, makes fear his excuse for the course he pursued personally. Dunn answers his plea of cowardice (not infrequent among the Jesuits, though it is for the most part the snake-like fear which crawls and stings in its hiding-place) as follows-and most earnestly do we endorse his bitter arraign- ment. He says :
131
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
"Think of it ! six white men, four of them priests of the God of the widow and the orphan, to stand by thus and see a defenceless girl so treated by her brutal ravisher ; to counsel and command her to submit, even after the savage had desisted ; to say to her, ' If you go to the lodge any more you must not re- turn here ;' and again, 'Are you in much trouble ?'" And though Dunn forgets to say it, we add, basest of all, to insult her purity of soul, though that of its casket might have been violated, by asking her, as she dragged her poor abused body wearily to the house sanctified by their immaculate presence, " How she liked her companion." God will answer thee that question, thou whited sepulchre, in the land beyond the grave.
What was the sequel of all this-a Protestant mission, de- voted to the best interests, both temporal and spiritual, of the Indians, burned by those whom it was reared to benefit ; their tried and devoted friends consigned to a bloody grave ; the tribe which committed these crimes made wanderers, hunted to the mountains, and obliged to flee branded with the mark of Cain and pursued by the avengers of blood ; five of these heathens dying on the scaffold to poorly avenge a fourfold murder ; a general alarm among all the white settlers both inland and coast ; great expenditure of money ; the levying of men and weeks of war ? But, nevertheless, the Jesuits succeeded to the missions of the Northwest. It may be, to quote from them- selves, that " the end sanctifies the means." Be this as it may, they remained in possession. Should their efforts " convert" every Indian west of the Rocky Mountains, it could hardly im- pair the full flavor of the original brand. They are welcome to their converts.
Have we sufficiently filled our "Horror Chamber"? Does any diseased imagination require pictures still more gruesome and revolting ? If so, they abound ; the pages of our State his- tory are blood-stained with such. But our pen, disgusted with its own self-appointed task, refuses to pursue the theme. Seek elsewhere. " Bastante gracias." No more for us.
" As gruesome spectres of the night Creep grimly on the dreamer's sight, Till vampires flit and serpents coil, They vainly strive to fright or foil.
132
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
So history the heart may thrill, With terror tales its records fill ; Proving that since the world began, Man's hatred of his brother man Hath filled the world with woe and fears, With vengeful grief and blinding tears."
-BREWERTON.
EfBrickell
CHAPTER XXVII.
LAST LINES OF WASHINGTON TERRITORIAL HISTORY.
" Thy stormy voyage now nears its end, Though many gales thy course attend. The stately star for which you steer No longer fades to fill with fear. Though hidden oft by gloomy day, And seemingly so far away, It gleams at length upon thy sight With full-orbed, pure, effulgent light."
-BREWERTON.
THE last years, and, indeed, the whole course of Washington's stormy territorial history were marked by struggles, both in the Legislature and the field, to retain with her inadequate resources her feeble colonies' foothold upon the soil, in doing which she found herself confronted by combinations of openly hostile and even more dangerous secret oppositions. It was no easy task to prepare herself to pass from a defensive to an offensive position, and finally win through the grim determination of her devoted first settlers and hardy pioneers her proud position as a sover- eign State-a State which knocked at the door of our national Legislature with no uncertain or trembling hand, but as one who asks a right in demanding admission.
The Whitman massacre, whose terrible atrocities the impor- tance of the event impelled us to detail in full, was, alas ! but the keynote and introductory incident of many an after Indian war, in which the federal troops, the Volunteers, and Indians suffered about equally, but the innocent and unprotected settlers most of all. Through this class, for the most part occupying isolated and defenceless positions, the " Massacre of the Mountains" sent a thrill of dread, a shudder of horror and anticipation lest like evils should fall upon the settlements of Puget Sound, and natu- rally checked emigration. The Rogue River, Yakima, and
7
136
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
Kliketat wars, the Modoc treachery, ending in the butchery of General Canby-a life worth all those of their rascally people combined-with a multitude of lesser skirmishes and individual acts of murder and outrage yet to come, added to the embarrass- ments of the territorial and federal officers, and kept the country in a continual state of excitement and alarm. The position of Washington during this time may not be inaptly likened to that of a captive running the gauntlet between two hostile lines, on one of which the Indians struck openly with their war chiefs and on the other the Hudson's Bay Company and kindred inter- ests dealt blows at second hand, none the less deadly because covert and unexpected. Nor was the situation ameliorated by the jealousies, dissensions, or misunderstandings -- name them as you will-existing between the federal and territorial authorities, both civil and military. Most fortunate was it for the progress and, indeed, preservation of our embryo State that similar dis- sensions, growing out of ancient feuds and rivalries, prevented the Indians of the Territory from massing their forces and acting in concert. Still more so, perhaps, that the Big Fish Eaters of the coast and the buffalo hunters of Eastern Washington did not possess the warlike character of the Sioux, Utes, and Dela- wares, or the prowess of their even fiercer brethren of the plains and Southwestern frontiers. It was bad enough as it was. The Modocs, whose very name means " strangers or enemies," gave us trouble enough ere they were dug out of their caves and lava- bed fastnesses. The Umpquas, who lived north of the Rogue River, had never been friendly to the Americans, even as far back as 1834, when they attacked one of our trading parties, killing eleven men. In 1835 they assailed another, killing four out of eight, and badly wounding the remainder. In 1838 they were beaten off with difficulty after wounding one of the first party sent out by the Willamette Cattle Company. In 1845 Fremont's third expedition would have fared badly at the hands of the Klamaths if Kit Carson's well-trained ear had not discov- ered their presence in time to repulse them, but not until they had beaten the savages in a hand-to-hand encounter. In 1851 the Rogue River Indians killed five whites, necessitating the ap- plication of a few wholesome lead pellets, prescribed to be taken immediately by the gallant one-armed Phil Kearney, adminis- tered by that officer in such allopathic style in two repeated
137
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
doses that they fled to the mountains, declining to receive any more of his heroic treatment. It is a pleasant thing to be able to state that they required no more blood-letting for two years afterward, being cooled for the time being by the white man's medicine. In 1852 the Pitt River Indians killed four men en- gaged in locating a wagon road ; and in August of the same year the Modocs, massacred an emigrant party of thirty-three. Volun- teers under Captain Ben Wright reached Bloody Point, on Tule Lake, just in time to save an emigrant train of sixteen wagons, whose occupants had been surrounded for hours, whereupon the Indians took to their canoes and continued to fight from the shelter of the Tule weeds ; but the rifles of the whites soon drove them out of range, making " good Indians" out of a dozen or more warriors. They gave up the conflict here, but next day the Volunteers found and buried the bodies of eighteen murdered settlers. Captain Wright remained with his party in this vicinity for three months, doing good service in guarding the incoming emi- grant trains, finishing off by what some humanitarian has been pleased to designate a "disgraceful massacre," but which was in reality nothing more than " fighting fire with fire"-in a word, giving the Indians a dose of their own medicine. He managed to get the Modocs into his camp, and before they parted com- pany he had converted about forty of them to the true faith by leaving their carcasses to enrich the soil they themselves had dedicated to bloodshed through the mutilation of men and the butchery of women and children. Captain Wright was after- ward murdered, with many others, by the Rogue Rivers while acting as their agent-as the same humanitarian tells us, " for his punishment." This " punishment" occurred February 22d, 1856, when the most of the Volunteers were absent at a Wash- ington Birthday ball at the mouth of the river. With him were killed Captain Poland and twenty-two others, among whom was a Mr. Wagoner, whose family had been murdered the preceding fall. One man alone, Charles Foster, succeeded in making his escape by hiding in the bushes. He estimated the force of the attacking party at three hundred. They then sacked and burned the ranches along the river, the settlers fleeing for their lives to Port Orford, where they fortified and stood on the defensive. We trust that the humane historian to whom we have referred was fully satisfied with the extent of Captain Wright's "pun-
138
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
ishment," for his "treachery" to the innocent Indians. The circumstances of his butchery should gratify the most exacting anxiety for fullest expiation. It may add a zest to that author's idea of poetical justice to narrate their details as we find them recorded by Evans. We have already given them elsewhere, but the matter in question seems to require their substantial repetition here. He tells us that on the morning of Febru- ary 22d a Canadian Indian named Enos, his most trusted agent, a man who had been with him at the killing of the Modocs, and was also a former employé of Fremont's, and commended by that officer, entered Captain Wright's quarters, and, being en- tirely unsuspected, was easily enabled to kill him with an axe. This, as in the Whitman case, was the signal for a general slaughter. Enos then proceeded to mutilate the Captain's body, cutting out the heart and eating a portion of it, in which horri- ble repast he was joined by a squaw. We commend this spe- cially to those sentimentalists who agonize over the delicate Indian women killed in a fight by some chance shot, where, in nine cases out of ten, they are active combatants. Comment is needless.
As may well be supposed, these little differences of opinion did not serve to render either party more amiable. Other causes conduced to this unhappy condition of things. The Senate of the United States had not seen fit to ratify the treaties made by Governor Stevens and his agents with the Indians, and in 1852 President Fillmore, in his message to Congress, suggested as a possibility what even then the action on both sides was making a reality in the region to which he referred.
After summing up the situation, he goes on to say :
" There being no recognition by the Government of the exclu- sive right of the Indians to any part of the country, they are, therefore, mere tenants at sufferance, and liable to be driven from place to place at the pleasure of the whites."
The Donation and other laws, whose liberal provisions were intended to encourage settlement in Oregon, gave each actual settler before 1850 the right to preempt three hundred and twenty acres of land, with, if married, an equal amount to his wife ; while settlers from December 1st, 1850, to December 1st, 1853, were entitled to half the amount. All lands being open, the set- tlers naturally helped themselves to the best they could find ;
Eng by F. G.Kernan,NY.
Alice Boughton.
141
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
and as the influx of emigrants was increased by the discovery of gold, settlements began to spring up about the mines ; hence the natives, who desired to oppose the barriers of the virgin forest to the assaults of civilization, were stirred up and made ill-tempered accordingly. Moreover, the treaties not being ratified, the Ind- ians failed to receive the price promised for the surrender of their lands. They were regarded by some as ill-treated-a sen- timent in which some of the older army officers, unused to the frontier, were disposed to sympathize. In evidence of this, read the report of Brigadier-General Hitchcock, commanding the De- partment of the Pacific, who, in 1852, writes to the Adjutant- General as follows :
" As matters now stand, the United States troops are placed in a most delicate and awkward position. The whites go in upon the Indian lands, provoke the Indians, bring on collisions, and then call for protection, and complain if it is not furnished ; while the practical effect of the presence of the troops can be lit- tle else than to countenance and give security to them in their aggressions, the Indians, meanwhile, looking upon the troops as their friends and imploring their protection." The civil courts of necessity took very much the same view as the military authorities.
Two cases in point may be cited here : the first that of cer- tain Kliketats, indicted in 1851 for malicious trespass in destroy- ing timber in Willamette valley, which a settler had prepared for his home. The Indians maintained-probably with a shrewd Yankee lawyer to assist them-that the timber was theirs, grown on their own land and cut from their own trees, and that they had warned the settler not to locate there. The United States District Judge held that they had possessory title, not yet extin- guished by the Government, and decided that the action could not lie. The second case was that of a settler named Bridge- farmer, who built a fence across one of the old Indian trails, who thereupon forcibly removed it. The farmer sued, and for a like reason was non-suited. Then, again, it was made a matter of complaint that in taking up their claims, the settler sometimes included an Indian's potato-patch-the west coast savage being as fond of that esculent as an Irishman. This trespass called forth a remonstrance from Lieutenant Jones, commanding at Steilacoom Barracks, who writes, in 1853, as follows :
142
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
" The practice that exists throughout the Territory of settlers taking from the Indians their small potato patches is wrong, and should be stopped."
The honest historian should ever be the champion and advo- cate of what lovers of athletic contests delight to call "fair play." To follow so excellent an example, and desirous as we are to accord a " fair field and no favor" to the combatants on both sides, we will quote the words of a Rogue River chief, who makes the strongest argument on their side of the question which has yet come within our notice. He says :
" We have waited and waited, because the agents told us to be patient, that it would be all right by and by. We are tired of this. We believe that Uncle Sam intends to cheat us. Some- times we are told that there is one great chief and sometimes an- other. One superintendent tells us one thing, and the great chief removes him ; then another superintendent tells us another thing, and another great chief removes him. Who are we to believe ? Who is your great chief, and who is to tell us the truth ? We don't understand the way you act. With us we are born chiefs ; once a chief we are a chief for life. But you are only common men ; and we never know how long you will hold your author- ity, or how soon the great chief may degrade you, or how soon he may be turned out himself. We want to know the true head, that we may state our condition to him. Let him come here himself and see us. So many lies have been told him that we think he never hears the truth, or he would not compel us to suffer as we do."
Now, whether Indian special pleading or not, we call this good, hard common-sense, and, withal, rather forcible logic. The speaker is evidently no friend to that " rotation in office" so dear to every new party in power. He is, moreover, an advocate of the centralization of authority and hereditary rights. It is a matter to be regretted that we are unable to change the Ameri- can Constitution to suit his views ; it is just possible that a sea- son or two with that third power, the Washington lobby, or even a few séances with his brother braves of Tammany Hall, might greatly enlighten, and possibly send him back to the shades of his forests better satisfied than ever with native ways and methods of legislation.
To return : the Rogue River Indians finding their country
143
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
overrun by the miners, chafed most of all. Settlements were springing up and farms being opened all along their valley. To discourage this and intimidate the new-comers, they inaugurated a campaign of rapine and destruction, begun August 4th, 1853, by the murder of a settler, whom they struck down upon the very threshold of his home. On the following day they butch- ered another within three hundred yards of Jacksonville. The people, seriously alarmed, gathered together for protection, leav- ing their undefended homes to be plundered and burned by the savages, who lost no time in applying the torch in every direc- tion. Captain B. R. Alden, than whom a truer gentleman or more gallant officer never lived, then commanding at Fort Jones, within the California line, was appealed to, and hastened to their assistance, but was only able to bring with him ten Regu- lars. These added to some hastily raised companies of Vol- unteers gave him nearly three hundred men. This force was preparing for a night attack upon the Indians, when a messen- ger came spurring in to announce that the Indians were raid- ing the valley, and the families of the Volunteers, who com- posed the great bulk of Alden's command, were in imminent danger. Without waiting for orders, these men disbanded themselves and hastened to their rescue, the reddening of the sky showing only too plainly that the evil news was true. By the time they had returned and were again ready to take the field the Indians had fled to the mountains, firing the pine woods behind them. While still preparing to pursue, General Joe Lane arrived and assumed the command .. They moved at day- break on the 22d, and searched in vain for two days and a half in an almost impassable country, rendered more so by recent forest fires. The smoke was in the air, all trails lost, the ground still hot under foot. Noon of the 24th brought them unexpectedly upon the enemy. General Lane, who was in advance, heard a sound of voices in a dense thicket some four hundred yards away. Quietly dismounting and forming into two parties, they made their attack. The Indians were taken by surprise, but quickly recovered. Flying to cover, they returned the fire with effect. They fought thus for four hours. General Lane, Captain Alden, and three others were badly wounded, and three killed on the part of the whites, while the Indians-probably from the sur- prise and effective first fire-suffered more seriously, losing no
144
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
less than eight killed and twenty wounded, of whom seven afterward died. While General Lane was in the rear having his wounds dressed, the Indians called a parley, and said they wanted peace. Two men went to talk with them, when, finding that General Lane, in whom they had great confidence, was there, they asked for him, and he joined the conference. As it was a drawn battle, with no chance to better the situation, an agreement was reached, the Indians promising to come to 'Table Rock and make a treaty. Both parties remained on the ground all night, good faith being observed on either side. The Indians kept their word, concluding a treaty on September 10th. But they were by no means conquered, to the Indian an indecisive engagement being almost a victory.
It is simply impossible to follow the ebb and flow of this eter- nal tide of war. We purpose to present a glimpse here and there as one discovers objects more lurid than the rest amid the. roar of some mighty conflagration, and then turn from the con- flicts of rifle and scalping-knife to the no less venomous but never dangerous encounters of tongues in that arena of words, the Legislative Assembly.
It was not until the spring of 1855 that the Kliketats, pleas- antly known among their neighbors-for the translation of the name so signifies-as "The Robbers," began to give us a taste of their quality. They were a powerful tribe, not great in num- bers, but well supplied with firearms and experts in their use. Their home was on the eastern slope of the Cascades, north of the Columbia, and from thence they would sally forth, making raids on the weaker tribes, and thoroughly earning among these people, by whom they were held in dread amounting to absolute terror, their title of " The Robbers." They continued their dep- redations until they had subjected and forced to pay them tribute all the tribes from the Columbia to the Rogue River Moun- tains, claiming all-and at that time it would have been hard to find a better title-by right of conquest. Dunn tells us that in their palmy days they maintained a state more nearly approach- ing regal magnificence than did any savage tribe in America. He instances this in the reception of Casino, one of their chiefs, by the British at Fort Vancouver. On disembarking, this haughty savage had his slaves lay a carpet of furs all the way from the landing-place to the fort, a quarter of a mile distant,
le Rigener.
Hannah L Easterbrook.
Bio, J, Easterbrook 900
147
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON.
that his aristocratic moccasins might avoid the pollution of treading upon the ground ; and on his return, the Hudson's Bay men, who had probably made an excellent bargain in the mean while, carpeted the same path with blankets and other goods. They had at first been friendly, and, indeed, in the battle just narrated, offered their services to General Lane, going with sixty warriors mounted and armed, but arriving too late for their ser- vices to be accepted. But in the treaties of 1851 they were un- fortunately ignored, yet continued to roam at will, taking a lib- eral tithe of fish and furs secured by other Indians within their borders, as also upon all increase of stock. This tended not only to the annoyance of their native neighbors, but to that of the whites, whose property they had begun to believe should also be taxed and levied on. Against this Governor Palmer remonstrated in 1853, and 1855 found them so reduced by disease that they were obliged to confine themselves to their original homes, where they remained planning mischief and nourishing their revenge. Meanwhile, the Yakimas (the Black Bears), an- other cheerful sobriquet, whose territory adjourned theirs on the north, did not understand, or, what is quite as likely, chose to misunderstand, their treaties made with Governor Stevens. The Indians claimed that their chiefs had been bought up-no such cases, of course, being ever known among the whites-and be- coming alarmed, indignantly repudiated their bargain. The representatives of the Hudson's Bay Company, with which their interests were allied as purchasers of their furs, took good care to fan the flame by circulating the report that the Americans would take away their lands. Mormon emissaries also worked, like the serpents that they were, among the tribes, crawling from lodge to lodge and diffusing their poison as they went. All that was needed to bring these smouldering fires of unrest to a blaze was a leader, and such a one appeared in Leschi, a Nisqually chief, who, like Peter the Hermit in the days of feudal chivalry, crossed the mountains with a few companions zealous as himself and preached a crusade of extermination against the whites. His work and character is thus pictured forth by the historian of the " Mountain Massacres :"
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.