Terrible Swift Sword Read Online Free Page B

convicted Chief Chimoneth and eight braves of participating in the massacre. They were hanged. 22
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    WHILE SHERIDAN AND HIS dragoons were camped near the blockhouse, a frontier guide, Joseph Meek, asked Sheridan whether an Indian named Spencer or his family had passed through the area. They were traveling to Fort Vancouver, where Spencer, an influential, peaceable Chinook chief, was an interpreter and mediator for Colonel Wright.
    Meek said that Spencer, believing it safe for his family to travel alone, had gone ahead, but the family had not yet reached Fort Vancouver. Meek glumly remarked that they were probably all dead.
    Sheridan and his dragoons began a search and soon found the bodies of the mother and six children. All had been strangled. The bodies were arranged in a semicircle, with short lengths of rope knotted around their necks—except for the baby, around whose neck was looped a red silk handkerchief, probably taken from the mother.
    The killers, Sheridan surmised, were probably whites avenging the deaths of their relatives during the recent settler massacres. He never forgot what he saw that day. 23
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    IN HIS GENERAL ORDERS No. 14, General in Chief Winfield Scott recounted the successful Cascades campaign and “the gallant conduct of the troops, under, in most cases, circumstances of great hardship and privation.” He added, “Second Lieutenant Philip H. Sheridan, Fourth Infantry, is specially mentioned for his gallantry.” In his first combat, Sheridan had displayed initiative, bravery, and a knack for improvisation. 24
    In 1857, the army and the militia got the upper hand in the Yakima War, and the tribes were compelled to cede enormous tracts of land west of the Cascade Mountains. The massacres and revenge killings had blighted the countryside. A traveler to the Washington coast in 1857 observed deserted, ruined homes and desolate fields. 25
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    GENERAL WOOL SENT SHERIDAN and his dragoons to Fort Yamhill to prod the 1,500 Indians on the Grande Ronde reservation in Oregon’s Coastal Range to adopt an agrarian life. For the next four years, the reservation was Sheridan’s home base.

    The Oregon Indian tribes had submitted tamely to the whites, except for the Rogue River bands, which refused to abandon their hunting-and-gathering ways. Sheridan and his men tried to persuade them at least to give up their self-destructive traditions, such as honoring the dead by destroying the deceased’s possessions and killing their horses on their graves. Another tradition permitted a family to kill a medicine doctor if a relative died under his care.
    One day, a band of Rogue River Indians murdered a medicine woman on Fort Yamhill’s parade ground after her patient died. Sheridan met with the Indians—by now, he was fluent in Chinook, the coastal tribes’ lingua franca—and demanded that they give up the sixteen men who had each fired a bullet into the woman’s body. The tribe refused. During the unsuccessful parley, someone stole Sheridan’s pistol.
    That night, Sheridan and fifty troopers raided the Indians’ camp and captured the chief. Sheridan threatened to kill him unless his tribesmen handed over the sixteen men. They surrendered the killers, and Sheridan placed all of them in chains. There were no further clashes between the Rogue River Indians and Sheridan’s men. 26
    Sheridan now had time to enjoy coastal Oregon’s beauty. He described watching squaws and their children gathering crabs at night on the beach at Yaquina Bay. With a torch in one hand and a sharp stick in the other, they impaled the crabs and deposited them in baskets that they carried on their backs. “The reflection by the water of the light from the many torches,” wrote Sheridan, “with the movement of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which we were never tired.” 27
    And then there was Sidnayoh—her white friends called