Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/336

Rh him with thirty mounted riflemen." This was easy to promise, but the riflemen themselves must have a voice in the matter. The officers of the rangers wrote to the committee demanding to know if after all there had been any cause for raising troops, or if there existed any need of their services at that moment. They were also anxious to be informed where the military stores, provisions, and pay were to come from, and concluded by remarking that if they were expected to fight at their own expense, they had enough to do to fight their own battles. The formation of the company was in fact a mere piece of braggadocio, intended quite as much to alarm the Hudson's Bay Company as to awe the natives. The only service in which the rangers were engaged was in the pursuit now and then of a band of hungry savages who had stolen a beef. White himself ridicules the course of the committee in calling out the troops because a miserable party of natives, whose single gun was broken and unserviceable, had been tempted to kill an old ox which chanced to stray in their vicinity, and for which they were forced to pay the gun and eight horses. Several of these small affairs signalized the existence of the Oregon Rangers. The last of the kind occurred in July 1846, when a small party of natives from east of the Cascade Mountains, being encamped on the Santiam River, near Looney's place, and suspected of stealing some horses belonging to him, were surrounded and fired on without further inquiry, though, as afterward transpired, they were innocent of the theft.

The next serious trouble with the natives came from an unexpected source. Early in the spring of 1845 White received a communication from Whitman at Waiilatpu, informing him of the return of a party