Page:The Early Indian Wars of Oregon.djvu/423



THE ROGUE RIVER WARS. 405

Captain Smith moved with his eighty troopers from Fort Lane about the thirteenth of April, a few days before the volunteers marched to their destination at the meadows. At the crossing of Rogue river, which was effected on a raft, he found a camp of Indians, which he attacked and de stroyed. Traveling through the mountains in rain and snow was exceedingly trying to dragoons, whose horses often were unable to carry them up the sharp and slippery ascents, compelling them to climb on foot. Wrote one of them: "We suffered much on the march. There was a thick fog on the mountains, and the guide could not make out the trail. We were seven days straying about, while it rained the whole time. Our provisions ran out before the weather cleared and we arrived at Port Orford." The experience was at least useful as showing what the volun teers had endured ever since October.

When Colonel Buchanan first arrived at the mouth of Rogue river, some of his younger officers and the soldiers plunged boldly into the forest in pursuit of the fleeing savages, but finding the scrambling over hillocks and through underbrush fatiguing, and the sting of arrows annoying, had been glad afterwards to leave such work to those who chose to perform it; while their chief spent about a month in the effort to induce the Indians in that region to go upon their reservations, without success. After occupying a defensive attitude for this period of time v on the twenty-sixth of April, Buchanan sent Lieutenant Ord, with one hundred and twelve men, to destroy a vil lage of the Mackanotins, eleven miles above Whaleshead, and to force them upon the reservation, which was accom plished with some fighting and loss of one soldier.

But there was plenty of fighting yet to be done in other quarters, as appeared when Ord with sixty men, on his way to Crescent City to escort a large train with army stores to the mouth of Rogue river on the twenty-ninth, was attacked at the Chetcoe river by about an equal number of Indians, losing in the skirmish one man killed