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“incompetency.” 19
    Sheridan was optimistic as 1856 began, although the Nez Perces, Spokanes, Cascades, Walla Wallas, and Umatillas had now joined the Yakimas on the warpath. Rains was gone, replaced by Colonel George Wright of the 9th Infantry, an able thirty-year veteran. Better still, the twenty-five-year-old Sheridan was leading his first independent command, small though it was, on a rescue mission. 20
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    CLOAKED BY THE COLD, early-morning fog on March 27, the Belle deposited Sheridan and his damp dragoons on a narrow neck of land about five miles downriver from the Middle Cascades blockhouse. The runoff-swollen Columbia River had made a peninsula of the shelf of vegetation-clotted dry land, hemmed on one side by a flooded slough and on the other by the river.
    Yakima and Cascade Indians were also on the neck of land, Sheridan and his men quickly discovered. The Indians commenced taunting and shooting at the soldiers. With six men, Sheridan advanced under cover of the thick underbrush to determine the Indians’ position and strength.

    There was another gust of gunfire, and a bullet nicked Sheridan’s nose and struck a soldier crouched beside him in the neck, severing his carotid artery and spinal cord and spraying blood everywhere. It was Sheridan’s first close brush with death under fire. Buoyed by the kill, the Indians rushed the scouting party, but other soldiers brought up the naval gun and opened fire with solid shot. The Indians withdrew.
    All day long, the dragoons and Indians traded gunfire, with neither side able to advance. At nightfall, Sheridan sent the Belle back to Vancouver with his written report on the situation.
    After a day’s desultory combat—Sheridan’s first—the blockhouse still lay five miles distant. But rather than wait for a relief force, Sheridan devised a new plan of attack.
    Early the next morning, after firing the cannon into the solid wall of green in which the Indians lay hidden, Sheridan and half of his forty dragoons boarded a large Hudson’s Bay bateau brought up on the Belle and crossed to the Columbia’s south shore.
    In the middle of the river, just below the blockhouse, lay Bradford’s Island, two miles long and a mile wide. Sheridan planned to row the bateau upriver along the island’s south side, concealed from the Indians on the north shore, and then to cross the river to the blockhouse.
    But the south channel was choked with rapids, and Sheridan saw that the bateau would have to be dragged by rope through the rocks and rapids to the smooth water opposite the blockhouse. Sheridan and ten men landed on the island and began hauling the boat upriver by a rope attached to its bow.
    It was slow, laborious work—until the soldiers happened upon a camp of Indian squaws. Commanding their silence, so as not to alert the warriors on the river’s north shore, Sheridan and his men forced the squaws to help them pull the boat. “They worked well under compulsion, and manifested no disposition to strike for higher wages,” Sheridan sardonically observed. 21
    Sheridan and his dragoons landed just below the blockhouse and, anticlimactically, rescued the settlers without further resistance from the Indians. A couple hours later, an army detachment under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe arrived from Vancouver.
    The Cascades on the north shore had fled to the island, while the Yakimas had bolted for the mountains. Sheridan, Steptoe, and their men crossed to the island, formed a skirmish line, and rounded up the Cascades—men, women, and children.
    The headmen denied playing any role in the settlers’ massacre or in the battle on the north shore. But when Sheridan lined up all the Indians with their muskets
in hand and checked them for powder residue, he found that all had been fired recently.
    Sheridan arrested thirteen of the “principal miscreants.” Colonel Wright convened a drumhead court, which