Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/697

646 holding them until the property was restored. The Indians attacked in consequence; there was a skirmish, a white man and a chief were killed, and several on both sides wounded; while four white men fled to the mountains in a panic, and were lost for several days, endeavoring to discover the trail to the Willamette Valley.

So alarmed was Waller that he sent for Abernethy, superintendent of Indian affairs, to quiet matters, and then hastened to overtake a company which had passed a few miles west of the Dalles, and request, them to return and protect his family and the wounded men.

A party did return, and Abernethy also came, who succeeded in procuring an audience with the principal chiefs, whom he induced, by paying them for the dead native, called Equator, to restore the property of the immigrants, and promise better behavior. But whether by these, or by the Walla Wallas and Cayuses, small parties of strangers continued to be plundered, and the property cached in the hills far away from the travelled road.

Whitman made a visit to the Dalles during the two months the companies were passing between the Blue and Cascade mountains. On his return from this journey, which Peter W. Crawford, to whom I