pressed his great anxiety, which had not permitted him to sleep for two nights. This letter was not written until the 31st of December, and the alarm from which Ogden was suffering was occasioned by the fact that he had no sooner received the captives at Walla Walla, by agreement, on the 29th, than rumors were received by the natives of the arrival of the first company of the volunteer riflemen at Walla Walla. The excitement occasioned by this intelligence it was feared might cause Spalding's company, which had not yet arrived, to be cut off, and any such resumption of hostilities would certainly be fatal to the success of his efforts for the rescue of even the Waiilatpu captives; for the rage of the savages would permit them to stop at nothing. But to his great relief Spalding arrived on the first of January, accompanied by a large force of Nez Percés. After spending another night in earnest council with these natives, always more friendly and more tractable than their relatives the Cayuses, Ogden embarked the ransomed company for Vancouver,[1] thankful to be able to do so.
Nor was he gone a moment to soon. A few hours after his departure fifty Cayuses arrived at the fort with the purpose of taking and killing Spalding, as they had all along declared their intention of doing, should they learn that any but peace commissioners were on the way to their country. It was this deter-
- ↑ Repugnant as was the idea of what the white women and girls had suffered at the hands of their captors, there were certain touches of feeling exhibited. When Miss Bewley was sent for it was yet early morning. According to her testimony, Five Crows prepared a good breakfast for her, with tea, and placed a new blanket and buffalo-robe on the saddle of her horse to make her comfortable, bidding her good-by in a kind manner. Spalding in his his lectures makes Miss Bewley say of her arrival at the fort: 'As we rode up, Governor Ogden and Mr McBean, with several Catholic priests, came out. Mr Ogden took me gently from the horse, as a father, and said, "Thank God, I have got you safe at last! I had to pay the Indians more for you than for all the other captives, and I feared they would never give you up."' State Rights Democrat, Jan 18, 1868. Stanley relates that a Cayuse who took to wife a girl of 14 years, after murdering her brother and gaining her submission by threats against the lives of her mother and sister, offered Ogden a large price for her, or to forsake his own people and live among the white people. Rept. Com. Ind. Aff., 1854, 219.
Pacific railway expedition in 1853. Many of his Indian portraits were placed in the Smithsonian Institution, and were destroyed by fire some time later.
