Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/372

 ' 364 T. W. DAVENPORT. of this letter: "The Indians wanted to trade ducks for powder, but the doctor and his party were afraid to let the Indians camp near them, so they pointed their guns at them, and the Indians ran. Then Dr. P. and party fired their guns over the fleeing Indians' heads and pursued them on horse- back to see how fast the Indians could run. It was the cause of Black's death and the whole trouble with the Bannock tribe of Indians that year." As the Indians are very good judges as to the meaning of human actions, presumably they did not believe that Patterson intended to shoot them, but what he did was a most dastardly insult which a white man would have considered just cause for war. Thereafter the emigrants had a running fight for a hundred miles along that portion of Snake River. My father, Dr. Benjamin Daven- port, and Dr. Hutton examined Mr. Black and decided that if he could be at rest or carried 011 a litter there was good prospect of recovery. But people were panicky and wanted to get out of the Indian country as soon as possible. The wounded man was placed upon a bed made by weaving a rope through holes along the upper edge of a wagon bed and car- ried in this way until he died. That he lived for seventeen days, jolted ten or twelve hours a day on rough and rocky roads, would seem to prove that the doctors were correct in their prognosis. Thousands of provocatives on both sides have never been recorded, and the order of their occurrence, especially with reference to priority, is wholly unknown ; sometimes from one side and sometimes from the other a single exhibition of brute force, an invasion of human rights from an untraceable source, being sufficient to bring on a collision between two races mutually distrustful and apprehensive of destructive assault. But along with such forbidding features, stand out in bold relief instances of sympathy and fraternity coming from both races that should redeem even the Indian from the general charge of unmitigated barbarism. Among our own people there is a small class whom we may call philanthropists, ever contending that the white man is the active and needless