Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/256

 December 12th. In about two weeks he succeeded in ransoming all the captives for blankets, shirts, guns, ammunition and tobacco, and at an expense of $500. No other man in the Territory, and no army that could have been mustered could have done it.

The Americans in Oregon promptly mustered and attacked the Indians, who retreated to the territory of a different tribe. But the murderers and leaders among the Indians were not arrested until nearly two years after the crime.

While some have charged that the officials of the Hudson Bay Company could have averted the massacre, this is only an opinion. Their humane and prompt act in releasing the captive women and children from worse than death, was worthy of it, and has received the strongest words of praise.

Thus was ended disastrously the work of the American Board which had given such large promise for eleven years. While its greatest achievement was not in saving savage souls, but in being largely instrumental in peacefully saving three great States to the American Union, yet 233 there is good evidence, years after the massacre, that the labors of the Missionaries had not been in vain. After the Treaty of 1855, seven years after the massacre, General Joel Palmer, who was one of the Council, says, "Forty-five Cayuse and one thousand Nez Perces have kept