AN INDIAN AGENT'S EXPERIENCE IN THE WAR OF 1886
By Henry C. Coe
The last Indian uprising in the Pacific Northwest, known as the Cayuse War of 1886, was not a great affair; a few whites and some Indians were killed, and some property destroyed. It was a pitiful failure the last feeble effort of a dying race to retain their homes, their tribal habits and their independence, bequeathed to them by their ancestors of unknown ages past, a protest against the encroachment and domination of the white man. The trouble was precipitated by the government using force of arms to effect the removal, to the various reservations, the numerous camps and villages of Indians scattered along the banks of the Columbia and Snake Rivers. For years past the reservation agents and special commissioners had utterly exhausted their stock of blandishments, promises and threats in order to effect a peaceable removal of the obdurate savages. But patience finally ceased to be a virtue and the soldiers came. The trouble first originated in the tribe of Chief Moses of the Grand Coulee Reservation in Northeastern Washington. A noted medicine man, Sem O Holla, commonly known as Smoholly, having possessed himself of a tamanowas (spirit), began to dream dreams and see visions. Sem O Holla then was a middle-aged man of more than ordinary intelligence. He had a fine face, always wreathed in smiles, but with a fearfully deformed body, being a hunchback, the second that I ever knew amongst the Indians. He was reputed to have had wonderful mesmeric forces and to have dealt largely in occult mysteries. His seances were always accompanied by the beating of torn toms, dancing and singing of war songs, and continued until the whole camp was in an uproar and resulted in the brutal murder of a family near Snipe's Mountain in Yakima County, Eastern Washington, by three young bucks who were on their way southward from Moses's camp to incite other tribes along the Columbia River to revolt. Old Chief
