A Close Call in the Indian Wars
A survivor recounts the harrowing 1856 campaign and a near-death encounter along the banks of the Snake River.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
General George L. Curry made the second call for volunteers Feb. 22, 1856. I started out again under Capt. Wm. A. Cason. Leaving Portland March 5, 1856, we reached the Cascades on the 6th, and on the 8th we were ordered to The Dalles. On the morning previous to our arrival, seventeen of our company were detailed to guard freight teams to Fort Henrietta. As we had started with nothing but flour and coffee, I killed a steer belonging to Nathan Olney to stay our appetites. The next day, some Indians made a rush on the guards and cut off about eighteen head of our horses. About twenty of us gave chase. I was looking after the horses when an Indian, about thirty yards away, fired point-blank at my head. The ball, or slug of iron, shaved off a lock of hair just above my right ear, and that member has been a useless appendage ever since. We recaptured some of the horses and later, in April, were tasked with driving cattle to starving commands near the forks of the Snake and Columbia rivers. We swam the cattle across the Snake in near-freezing water, clad only in undershirts and drawers. Later, while acting as a scout near the John Day river, I was nearly ambushed by Indians using a decoy on a hill. We rode for our lives, depending on our horses to escape.
“The ball, or slug of iron, shaved off a lock of hair just above my right ear, and that member has been, though perhaps ornamental, a useless appendage ever since.”
The pioneer narratives of the 1880s often glorified the brutal expansionist conflicts of the 1850s, glossing over the dispossession of Indigenous populations. Today, these accounts serve as primary documents for understanding the historical erasure and conflicts that shaped the colonization of the Yakima Valley.
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