Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/139

 were in the hands of territorial officials amenable directly or indirectly to the people.

But a military establishment and the conduct of military operations involving necessarily more burdensome expenditures than those for civil affairs were less adequately provided for. The situation of the Oregon community was such that no system of garrisoning practicable with detachments from the national standing army could have sufficed for adequate protection against the Indians. There was recurring and exigent need throughout most of this period in this section for instant movements for the summary suppression of Indian outbreaks campaigns for which the volunteer forces commonly alone were available, and for which they were always indispensable. The isolated Oregon community in the early fifties was scattered from the headwaters of the Willamette to the southern shores of Puget Sound. Soon there were lone settlers along the trail to California and outlying hamlets at the newly discovered gold diggings. A thin line of settlements at least five hundred miles in length was thus exposed to the depredations of infuriated tribes. For it was hemmed in on the landward side by a broad semicircular belt of Indian territory. This included on the south the valleys of the Umpqua, the Coquille, the Rogue and Klamath rivers; on the east the lower Snake and its tributaries and the upper Columbia; on the north the basin and islands of the Sound. This vast area was infested with proud and, in some cases at least, treacherous tribes of red men. At any rate, the resentful spirit of any race of men would have been aroused by the great annual autumnal processions of immigrants that moved through this territory along the Oregon and California trails, and by the constant overland travel and traffic between Oregon and California that grew up with the development of gold mining activity, and later there were bold incursions into and encroachments upon these Indian preserves, induced by reports of new Eldoradoes found. The feelings such racial pressure would arouse in the hearts of these tribes, who saw