Page:Our First Indian War.djvu/1



Until 1853 Oregon Territory reached from the Rocky mountains to the Pacific ocean and from the California line to British Columbia. All of the States of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana, were then included within these limits.

In Oregon, at the time of the coming of Jason Lee and Daniel Lee, his nephew, the first missionaries, there were probably about one hundred thousand Indians. Among these, small parties of white men were never entirely safe except among part of the Nez Perces tribe and the natives of the lower Willamette Valley and the upper Puget Sound region. Of course detached families, prospectors, travelers, etc., came and went at will all over this region, and often without harm coming to them, but the record of pillage, outrage and murder during the half century from about 1830 down to 1880 is a long and bloody one. Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor was a careful historian, taking pains at all times to be sure of the facts and to understate rather than to magnify, yet she says the number of white persons killed and wounded within the above limits between the years 1824 and 1878 was eighteen hundred and ninety-six, an average of thirty-seven annually. Of these, the unprovoked murders made more than half the total; the remainder being those wounded in attacks equally unprovoked, or killed and wounded in warfare.

The first Indian war began late in 1847, immediately following the massacre of the mission party at Waiilatpu, with Marcus Whitman at its head, and only a few of these murders occurred before that time, which at least doubled the annual number of fatalities after that time. As a matter of fact, the greater portion of the victims of Indian violence fell between the years 1850 and 1862, a period of twelve years, and during that time the annual loss was at least one hundred and fifty, a frightful drain upon a sparse population.

Most of those who suffered were men in the prime of life, who could ill be spared by the struggling young territories, though comprising all classes—travelers, prospectors, miners, ranchers, traders, freighters, and, lastly, volunteers, who left their homes and families to go to the Indian country in defense