The Deadly Ambush at Council Prairie
An eye-witness account of a harrowing escape during the Puget Sound Indian War, describing a fatal skirmish, a desperate trek through winter swamps, and the loss of Colonel A. Benton Moses.
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.
On October 30th, Col. A. Benton Moses, Dr. M. P. Burns, George Bright, Joseph Miles and myself, in company with the express messengers, left camp at the first crossing of the Naches River. We traveled unmolested until we arrived at Council Prairie, in the White River Valley, at 3 o'clock Wednesday evening. Here we met with a party of Klickitat and Snoqualmie Indians, numbering about 130 warriors. Finding Mr. Council's house had been burned, we inquired who had burned it. They stated all knowledge of the cause and declared themselves entirely peaceable.
We mounted our horses again and proceeded about a half mile to a deep muddy swamp, where we received a murderous discharge of balls from these very same Indians, who had secreted themselves in ambush. Colonel A. Benton Moses received a ball entering the left side of the back, passing under the heart and out the right breast, piercing a letter in his coat pocket. Joseph Miles of Olympia was wounded in the neck, unable to regain his horse. We dragged him out of the mud, but he became so faint he urged us to leave him. We were compelled to do so as the Indians were pouring a continuous fire, not thirty yards distant.
We rode to Finnell's Creek, discovered another ambuscade, and charged into the brush, discharging our revolvers at such close range—sometimes against their bodies—that we routed them. Returning to Colonel Moses, we wrapped him in our coats and left him, his last words being, 'Boys, if you escape, remember me.' We then fled through the brush and freezing swamps for days, suffering intense exposure, eventually arriving at Steilacoom on Friday morning. Captain Wallace later found the body of Colonel Moses, and Joseph Miles, who had been tortured fearfully.
“We were compelled to remain in the deep mud and water until long after dark, all the while shaking with cold so much that our cartridges rattled like cow bells.”
This account captures the brutal, intimate violence of the 1855-1856 Puget Sound Indian War. Today, the geography of the White River Valley and the Puyallup bottom, once the site of such desperate survival, is the highly developed, densely populated corridor between Seattle and Tacoma, masking the deep scars of the conflicts that shaped the territory.
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