THE ROGUE EIVEE WARS. 341
Gray, Edward Parrish, John L. Fickas, F. D. Mattice, T. D. Mattice, and two other men known as Raymond and Pedro. Several Indians were also killed in the fight.
A company of volunteers was organized on the south side of the Siskiyous, and commanded by William Martin, proceeded to the reservation, and demanded the surrender of the murderers, which demand Captain Smith refused on technical grounds. He could not deliver persons charged with crime into the hands of a merely voluntary assemblage of men. Later, however, in November, some arrests were made on a requisition from Siskiyou county.
Another affair in the month of August produced a strong feeling against the military even more than the Indians. An Indian in the Port Orford district shot at and wounded James Buford near the mouth of Rogue river. Ben Wright, the agent, delivered the Indian to the sheriff of Coos county, who, having no place in which to confine his prisoner, delivered him to a squad of soldiers to be taken to Port Orford and placed in the guardhouse. While the canoe containing the prisoner and his guards was passing up the river to a place of encampment, it was followed by Buford, his partner Hawkins, and O Brien, a trader, determined to give the Indian no chance of escape through the sympathy of the military authorities. Watch ing their opportunity they fired upon the canoe, killing the prisoner and another Indian. The fire was promptly returned by the soldiers, who killed at once two of the white men, and mortally wounded the third.
The indignation aroused by this affair against the mili tary was intense. The cooler heads saw that technically the soldiers were in the right; but the majority could not Percéive the propriety of putting white men on a par with Indians. Even an Indian, they felt sure, would never have shot down men of his own race in defense of white men. A contempt, too, for military dignity was supplant ing respect. An Indian had shot into a crowd in which
