Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/143

Rh changes occurred, but the regiment remained practically the same for its full term.

The winter of 1861-'62 was one of extreme cold with heavy snows. Miners who attempted to stay through the season in their camps were driven out by the prospect of starvation, and frozen to death, or killed by Indians on the trail, when they became food for the famished savages. The spring floods brought down many bodies of, or fragments of bodies, of these unhappy adventurers, warning the volunteers of the nature of the foes they were to encounter.

Volunteering went on tardily through the winter, with headquarters at Vancouver. Eastern Oregon furnished but forty men, recruited at The Dalles by Captain Currey, and brought up to the standard by detachments from other companies. This was the first company in the field, a detachment being sent out early in March, by the commanding officer at The Dalles, to find and search a camp of Indians from the Simcoe Reservation suspected of murdering a party of miners on John Day River. No evidence being found in their camp, the detachment returned from a disagreeable march on the fifth day, having performed the first scouting duty of the regiment, between the eighth and twelfth of March inclusive.

Captain Currey was not only an indefatigable officer and good cavalryman, but a man possessed of a poetic and literary turn of mind which is seldom found in connection with the more active qualities. He was a sort of Oregon "Teddy Roosevelt" in temperament, but unhappily for him, deprived of the opportunity to shine. This deprivation, that came from his being in the Oregon cavalry, which he had joined in the hope and expectation of being sent to fight for loyalty to his country, as time dragged on through the weary three years in the Indian service became an actual grief to him. This is apparent