on the new route, by others interested in having the travellers brought to the Dalles and Oregon City, and by the owners of the Mount Hood road. Letters were sent to Green River to meet them, in which they were counselled to starve, whip, and even kill any person advising them to take the southern road. A circular was distributed containing an exaggerated account of the calamities suffered the previous year, and recommending the Barlow road. As the circular made no mention of the hardships and losses of travellers by the Mount Hood pass of the Cascade Mountains, and as it was signed by the govenor, all but forty-five of the wagons took the route by way of the Snake and Columbia rivers, with the results before mentioned.[1]
From a manuscript narrative of the overland journey called the Southern Route, by Thomas L. Davidson,[2] it appears that the natives on the Humboldt and about the lake county of southern Oregon were troublesome, shooting cattle, and wounding a herder named Henry Williamson. They soon after attacked a train as it was passing under a rocky point on the border of Modoc or Tule Lake, which was saved by a dash of two savage dogs putting the natives to flight.[3]
One of the men who accompanied Levi Scott to and from Fort Hall, named Garrison, was killed near Granite Ridge, and Scott himself was wounded, but with one arm pinned to his side by an arrow, shot one Indian, and put another to flight. Had this been the
- ↑ Levi Scott, in Or. Spectator, Nov. 11, 1847; Ross' Nar., MS., 4–8; Grim's Emigrant Anecdotes, MS., 1–6; Or. Spectator, Nov. 25, 1847.
- ↑ T. L. Davidson, son of James Davidson, sen., was born in Illinois in 1833. When he was 12 years old his brothers Albert and James went to Oregon. In 1848 Albert returned to the States, and by his enthusiastic discriptions of the Oregon country induced his father and many persons in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri to emigrate. Southern Route, MS., 1, 2. Davidson mentions the death in the Klamath country of Mrs Benj. F. Burch, of consumption. She was going to join her husband.
- ↑ In Ind. Aff. Rept., 1873, mention is made of a massacre at this place in 1847, which is an error. No massacre was effected at this pass until after the year 1850.
