Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/795

744 of them to the Indians; and explained that what had been seized was the annual supply of the four missions of Okanagan, Cœur d'Alêne, Pend d'Oreille, and Flathead River. In answer to a remark of Lee, that much excitement and bad feeling against the Catholics existed, Accolti replied that he believed it, but that Lee must know that it was undeserved, and that the prejudices grew out of unjust suspicions and a grovelling jealousy.

This answer, which contained some truth, was not altogether just to the Protestants, the more intelligent of whom were able to discriminate between fact and prejudice; nor was it calculated to soften the sectarian feeling, which culminated in December in a petition to the legislature to expel the Catholics from the country, which was refused. The quarrel ended by permitting them to retain possession of their other missions, but denying them the Umatilla country, to which for a period of many years they did not return.

All the fighting and marching of the Cayuse war was executed by the colonists without aid from any source. The first intelligence which reached the outside world of the massacre at Waiilatpu was received at the Sandwich Islands in February by the English bark Janet, Dring, master, which conveyed a letter from