Page:The Early Indian Wars of Oregon.djvu/377



THE ROGUE RIVER WARS. 359

The northern battalion was ordered to be raised two companies in Lane, and one each in Linn, Douglas, and Umpqua counties, to rendezvous at Roseburg. Adjutant- General E. M. Barnum left the movements of the two bat talions to their respective commanders, directing, however, that all Indians should be treated as enemies who were not unmistakably friends. The only "instructions" were to endeavor to act in concert with the regular army officers.

It would be hard to see in what respect the course pur sued by the volunteers in the field differed from the governor s or the adjutant-general s, or even the Indian superintendent s directions; yet five days later Governor Curry ordered disbanded the battalion already in the field from Jackson county, and raised under the militia law of the territory, because, forsooth, information had reached him that Indians had been slaughtered "by a rabble from the neighborhood of Yreka," 18 and he, by inference at least, classed all the men of the south in arms against the Indians with that rabble, by which was meant Major Lup- ton s party, which attacked the Indians off the reservation on the morning of the eighth of October, and whose action, if doubtful in appearance at the time, was justified by the events which immediately followed it, showing that the Indians were, as he believed, prepared for mischief.

Notwithstanding the disbanding of Ross regiment on account, presumably, of their hostility to the Indians, the men were invited to reenlist in the southern battalion to fight these same Indians. The odium thus was left to rest upon the officers, who were largely of a political party opposed to that to which the governor belonged; and this was supposed to account for the slight put upon those who had hastened to the defense of their country at her mo ment of greatest peril.

The first effect of the governor s proclamations was to suspend volunteering. On the seventh of November, the

18 Oregon Statesman, Januar