Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/158

148 I flattered myself, was materially aided by the night ride of 1862."

There is not space in a magazine article to continue the details which give interest to Currey's report. His objective point being the Owyhee, it is only necessary to say that after leaving the emigrant road, about the middle of May, the experiences of the previous summer were repeated—riding among rocks and sagebrush through the long, hot days to come at last to a stream several hundred feet below the surface of the surrounding country. Some of the descriptive passages are very interesting; indeed, I know of no traveler in the Northwest, unless it is Theodore Winthrop, whose word pictures of natural objects are equal to those of our acting colonel of the First Oregon Cavalry. Here is something from the Owyhee country:

"The region immediately opposite the mouth of Jordan Creek has a weird, antiquated look; it is one of the unusual landscapes wherein the wind has been the most powerful and active agent employed by Dame Nature to complete her exterior. The formation is of greyish red sandstone, soft, and under the capricious workings of the wind for centuries, has assumed shapes strange and fantastic. Here stands a group of towers; there is an archway curiously shaped; yonder is a tunnel running the face of a sandstone ledge hundreds of feet from the bottom. The whole catalogue of descriptive antique might be exhausted in giving fanciful names to the created results of this aerial architecture. The spectacle of seeing my command wind its way through this temple of the wind was pleasing, and one that will long be remembered by the most who beheld it."

Camp Henderson was established on Gibb's Creek, about eight miles from the mouth of Jordan Creek, on the twenty-sixth of May, 1864,—distant from Walla Walla three hundred and thirty miles,—and the tents