Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/369

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when the howling Klamaths sounded the whoop on the hills. They began shooting cattle, raiding cabins, and closing round the house of the hyas tyee, the principal white man, into whose log house the frightened settlers fled. A postman came in sight; he put spurs to his steed and gave the alarm up the valley. Before sunset sixty men and boys had chased the Klamaths to their rock-walled, brush-covered camp on the Abiqua bottom. From a rocky ledge at early dawn there came a flight of arrows. The American rifles blazed. In the cold and drizzling rain lay the dead. Among the fallen warriors was an Indian woman, withered and shrunken, with a drawn bow in her dying grasp. It was old Waskema.

The Klamaths fled over the southern mountains. The rising in the valley was quelled, but the measles went on silently, surely, depopulating the camps of the red men.

Governor Abernethy issued a third call for men. With dismay the Indians beheld a second army advancing into the upper country. Already their herds were ruined, ammunition gone, their families scattered. The Cayuses as a people had no heart in the war. Every day at sunset the mothers lamented the act that had brought this trouble upon them. The opposition narrowed to the few who had participated in the massacre, and some sympathizers who had assisted their escape. In April the army summed up the situation:

"Where are the murderers? "

"Fled beyond the Rockies."

"Will you, Pio-pio-mox-mox and Tauitau, deliver them up on their return?"

"Yes, if you will give us peace."

"Where is Jo Lewis?"


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