Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/135

Rh this class of men. The deaths and desertions on the march numbered seventy men enough for a company. The other losses by the way were thirty horses and nearly three hundred mules. Forty-five wagons and one ambulance were among the abandoned property.

On arriving at their journey's end no quarters were found prepared for their reception at Vancouver, and as winter with its rains was setting in the soldiers were quartered as best they could be at Oregon City. Their presence in the metropolis of Oregon was anything but delightsome to its inhabitants, who were soon made as unhappy by the advent of troops as they had been previously by the want of them. When spring opened there was a wholesale desertion of one hundred and twenty riflemen organized into a company, which, by rapid marching for two or three days, kept in advance of a proclamation by the governor warning the farmers, off whom the deserters expected to live, not to trust or harbor them. Their well concerted plan was to pass themselves off as a company sent out by the government to purchase beef cattle on government credit.

Lane and Loring overtook one division in the valley of the Umpqua, the governor returning to Oregon City with seventy men in charge. The forward division reached Klamath Kiver before it was overtaken by Colonel Loring, and thirty-five men escaped by canoe across to the south side. With the remainder, which was in a miserable condition from insufficient food and hard traveling in snow, he returned after a two weeks' forced march, leaving the fugitives to their fate, which undoubtedly was death to some, if not all of them. Soon after this incident the artillerymen were removed from Vancouver to Astoria, and the riflemen put to work erecting quarters at the former place, by order of Gen. Persifer F. Smith, commanding the Pacific division. The quartermaster