THE ROGUE EIVER WAES. 399
furnished fresh incentive to the volunteers in that neigh borhood to strike back. The time seemed propitious, for the Indians, so continuously harrassed by them, had begun to show signs of weakness, some of the poorer bands being not unwillingly taken prisoners and sent to Fort Lane, where they were fed and protected.
On the sixteenth, Lieu tenant -Colonel Chapman and Major Bruce moved with the entire southern battalion down the south side of Rogue river towards the meadows; the northern battalion passing down the north side entire, with the exception of Captain Thomas W. Prather s spy company, provisioned for thirty days; with Colonel Kel- sey and Brigadier-General Lamerick in the field, Lamerick having declared to the governor his intention to stay with the enemy until they were subdued or starved out.
On encamping at Little Meadows on the twenty-first the picket guard was fired upon. A force of forty men, ten each from the companies of Noland, Sheffield, Robertson, and Wallen, was ordered out to engage the Indians, who, however, fled before them down a deep canon, under cover of the thick underbrush, and were soon beyond reach. Captain Barnes then went out with twenty-five picked men to reconnoiter, and found that the Indians were encamped in considerable numbers on a bar on the south side of the river between Little and Big Meadows.
The effective force in the camp of the northern battalion numbered two hundred and ten men. With a detach ment of fifty men, Colonel Kelsey made a reconnoissance on the morning of the twenty-second, having to cross a deep canon and ascend a high mountain densely timbered with fir and underwood, but having near the summit a small prairie, near which he halted his command and sent forward spies. They immediately returned with the in formation that the enemy s camp was in plain view from the prairie. Kelsey then moved forward to ascertain whether or not the Indians were fortified, and was fired on while taking observations. He drew up his men in order
